Benefits Realisation Management explained in simple terms

I recently experienced an award-winning project manager summarising my presentation about Benefits Realisation Management and Project Success at the PMI Global Congress EMEA (May/2015) in a way that is probably better than I would do. Elizabeth Harrin has cleverly split the first half of my presentation into 4 parts, which in my view has made it quite an easy and enjoyable reading. Although I saw the posts only after they went live at PMI’s networking website/community ProjectManagement.com, I felt very glad and really liked her initiative.

My presentation was a revised version of the webinar Benefits Realization Management and Project Success (originally presented to the PMI Organisation Project Management Community of Practice), which I expanded with additional information from recent research findings. Its first half, summarised in the four posts, gives a brief overview of Benefits Realisation Management.

The first part is an introduction to benefits management (Benefits Realisation: The Basics Explained, @The Money Files), where she explains that benefits are generated from change that takes place to move the business from a current state to a future desired state – or ‘Vision’. She presents a nice handmade drawing that is her redraw of a picture from one of my research articles published by the International Journal of Project Management (Filling the value gap, adapted from Serra & Kunc, 2015).

 Then, the post explains the meaning of ‘to realise’, as ‘causing something to happen’, ‘making people aware of that’ and ‘making money from that’. It also notes the translation issues that may happen when the term is used in other languages. It also presents my explanation that in simple terms “Benefits realisation is a process to make benefits happen and also to make people fully aware of them throughout the entire process.”

Note that ‘Benefits management: Lost or found in translation’, which is a comprehensive analysis of the spread of benefits management around the world and across different languages, was recently published by Richard Breese, Steve Jenner, John Thorp and me (Breese et al., 2015).

The post concludes by explaining benefits realisation management as a process that involves several different roles in an organisation and that starts before the beginning of a project lifecycle and goes well beyond its end.

The second post presents tools and roles for benefits realisation management (Tools and Roles for Benefits Realisation Management, @The Money Files). It notes the complexity that exists around benefits realisation management (BRM) – that’s maybe why organisations are increasingly hiring specialist in this area. Then, a list of BRM tools is presented and each tool is briefly described. I really liked the way she added her views on top of a summary of my comments about each tool. After that, she presents the three main groups of roles that I employed to classify the different perspectives involved in the benefits realisation process – which is aligned to the brilliant model proposed by Zwikael and Smyrk (2011).

The third post (How can benefits realisation be managed?, @The Money Files) talks about the journey from the delivery of project outputs to the achievement of organisational strategic objectives. The relationship between the steps of this process is illustrated by another very nice handmade drawing that redraws another picture from my research article (Benefits Dependency Network, adapted from Serra & Kunc, 2015). She explains that the groups of processes to manage such journey can be split into planning benefits, reviewing and measuring benefits and then realising benefits, all these aligned by an organisational benefits realisation management strategy.

The fourth and last post of the series, focus on the effective utilisation of benefits realisation management by an organisation (5 Barriers to Effective Benefits Realisation Management?, @The Money Files). It explains the 5 key points found by my research, which are:

• Levels of organisational competence in the technical skills required by benefits realisation management.
• Organisational culture around project success and strategic management.
• Integration between business processes and departments and/or functions.
• Specific processes for benefits realisation management, especially when projects deliver to customers that are external to the organisation.
• Benefits realisation strategies on corporate level covering the entire benefits realisation lifecycle.

These five are published in several places and I repeated a number of times in interviews and presentations. But, a couple of weeks ago, colleague asked my opinion about the really key tips for an organisation to success in benefits realisation management – it had to be something new, from my experience. After a minute of reflection, I shared my view of two very important aspects to ensure not only success in benefits realisation management, but business success:

• Manage your business as a business has to be managed: have a clearly defined business strategy and manage the execution of your strategy. Know the objectives that each of your initiatives (investments) aim to support the achievement.
• Know your processes and control your performance: have a clearly defined business model (and if possible a value chain) so that you know which processes generate value to your business and then you can manage their performance. Only by managing the performance of your processes you can really enhance it.

These two sound much more as a recommendation to business leaders than to project managers. That is maybe because much more than influencing project success, benefits realisation management influences strategic project success and the creation of value to the business (Serra & Kunc, 2013; Serra & Kunc, 2015).

I hope you like this post. If you have further interest in this subject, I recommend you to have a read at Elizabeth Harrin’s posts – they are very good.