Active benefits realisation: survey of practices

The purpose of benefit realisation or, more specifically benefit measurement, is not simply to ‘look-back’ and see if we got the benefits. Nor is it to help justify and prioritise projects within the portfolio but more importantly to provide the revised operational measures which guide operational change.

We need to get much better at understanding the surrogate measures and performance indicators related to the project delivery, which can be measured quickly and show that operational performance is moving in the right direction. After all, these are exactly the new performance measures that will be needed to manage and structure the revised operational environment.

In 2009 the APM instigated the ‘Active Benefits Realisation Management survey’. This took feedback from 103 organisations in the public and private sectors. The aim of the survey was to assess perceptions of maturity in the take-up of benefits management and to identify areas of strength and weakness across the industry. The results were published in September 2009.

The report includes comments on the barriers to benefits realisation and amongst these the following comments seem particularly relevant:

• Project focus – the excitement/pressure is in the project start and delivery, checking it was worth while doing might be embarrassing…it was delivered on time and on cost, it’s a success – don’t spoil it by seeing if we should have even done the job.

• Process & compliance - we have good ownership of benefits, but our follow-up does not yet have sufficient rigor. We need to achieve this without the process being seen as unnecessary bureaucracy.

• Political dimension - projects/programmes are started in response to a political commitment and so the task becomes one of finding sufficient benefits to justify the chosen solution.

• Leadership - it is key to ensure that accountable executives (Sponsors) recognise their role, and commit the same time and energy to benefits for delivery and costs; the lead business manager (sponsor) is not incentivised / penalised on the outcome.

• Business focus and change management - there is still more to do to get it fully embodied into change management including: improved commitment to, and compliance with standards.

• Organisational change - the environment the project is delivered into is different than when project is assessed.

• Locus of responsibility - roles and responsibilities not clear and the benefits realisation process often end up owned by the project team.

• Cultural issues - need to change the culture to more actively seeking benefit opportunities; no pressure to change or to hold people to account for realisation of planned benefits.

• Technical issues - lack of a link between project/programme benefits and strategic targets; difficulty of measuring long-term benefits and attributing them to a specific initiative; need to improve the toolkit for quantification and valuation of benefits.

• Awareness - lack of experience/knowledge in identifying and quantifying benefits within the PPM community; no clear understanding of how to quantify and therefore measure benefits; lack of senior management interest/understanding in the detail of how benefits realisation should work. No desire to link change activity to benefit achievement, paying lip service to benefits.

A full copy of the paper, Active Benefits Realisation Management – Research Survey of Perceptions of Maturity, Stephen Jenner 2009 - can be found at 

http://www.ogc.gov.uk/documents/BenefitsRealisationManagementPhase2Reportv2_0.pdf

For more information on how CITI can help you to successful embed Active Benefits Realisation in your organisation please contact Amanda Muscat on 01908 283600.