Continue reading » No related posts.]]> The area of benefits realisation is frequently glossed over in favour of other areas of project management. During project initiation, the structure is put in place, the budget is approved and often vague benefits are documented in the business case. Once the money is spent there are little effective mechanisms in place to track how the project has impacted the organisation and so it is difficult to show how the business will release the value of its investment over time.

Managing benefits from OGC

The Office of Government and Commerce (OGC) has written an excellent document on this subject last year, outlining the background of benefit management and providing an example framework:

• role in the business case,
• benefits realisation strategy & plan,
• benefits management action plan,
• programme roles & responsibilities.

This also includes examples from Inland Revenue & CJIT (with Capgemini) and a sample Benefits Profile template: See www.ogc.gov.uk/documents/ManagingBenefitsV101.pdf

Change Program Benefits Management from DVLA

This is also an excellent example on the website from DVLA:
www.ogc.gov.uk/documents/CP0019_DVLA_Change_Program-Benefits_Management.pdf

The OGC has incorporated the benefits framework into their Prince 2 2009 and Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) products. There is a lot more emphasis on benefits in the new Prince 2 2009 course; in particular around how these need to be tracked and realised post project and how this works in a programme environment.

For current literature on the subject, Steven Jenner has produced some fine work in his book “Realising benefits from ICT – a fools errand” and he is the former Director of Criminal Justice IT programme in the UK. Link:
http://academic-publishing.org/Stephen_Jenner.htm

Benefits management is particularly important in difficult times where project funding is limited and prioritization by business benefits will need to take precedence.

Amands Symonds

Amanda has previously worked as a benefits management course facilitator for Sigma UK, in Surrey. She holds ITIL, Prince 2 and MSP certifications and is currently working as a consulting project manager for MetaPM in Melbourne, Australia (www.metapm.com.au).

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> Quality Management

Quality management in a programme ensures that stakeholders are satisfied that their planned benefits have the best chance of being realised and will meet their expectations. If a programme does not apply quality effectively to its activities, its assets and outputs are less likely to be fit for purpose, with the consequential detrimental impact on the outcomes and desired benefits.

Quality management must be an activity that runs continuously throughout the life of a programme and beyond, the focus being on helping the programme with the achievement of the strategic goals.

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> Business Case

The programme’s Business Case provides the vital test of the viability of the programme. It should be used to answer the question “Is the investment in the programme still worth it?”

Since this viability question is ongoing, the Business Case is actively maintained throughout the programme and continually updated with new information.

The Business Case is an aggregation of specific information about the value of the benefits, the risks to achieving them, the costs of delivering the Blueprint and the timescales for achievement.

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> Risk Management and Issue Resolution

A risk is an uncertain event or set of events which, should it occur, will have an effect on the achievement of objectives. These effects need not all be detrimental as a risk can be either a threat or an opportunity.

The task of risk management is to ensure that the programme make a cost-effective use of a Risk Management Process that includes a series of well-defined steps. The aim is to support better decision-making through a good understanding of risks and their likely impact.

Issues, on the other hand, are events that have happened, were not planned, are currently affecting the programme in some way and need to be actively dealt with and resolved. Risks, should they occur, become issues.

The task of issue resolution is to prevent an issue from threatening the programme’s chances of achieving a successful outcome.

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> Planning and Control

Planning and control are key to the success of any transformation programme, but should be seen as distinctly separate concepts and activities. The preparation of a Programme Plan involves processing large amounts of information and extensive consultation to build the plan.

Programme control provides supporting activities and processes that run throughout the programme to refine and improve delivery, minimise the impact of ambiguity and bring certainty wherever possible.

The Programme Plan should include information on the Project Dossier (timescales, costs, outputs and dependencies), risks and assumptions, a schedule showing the tranches, the transition plan and the monitoring and control activities and performance targets. The Monitoring and Control Strategy will set out the approach for applying the programme’s internal controls based on the Programme Plan.

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> The governance theme Vision

A vision is a picture of a better future. It is the basis for the outcomes and delivered benefits of the programme, and as such it is a vital focus and enabler for the buy-in, motivation and activity-alignment of the large community of people involved in the programme.

The Vision Statement is used to communicate the end goal of the programme being an outward-facing description of the future state following programme delivery.

A good Vision Statement should be written in the future state, be easy to understand and to communicate, apply to a broad range of stakeholders, describe a desirable and compelling future that matches the degree of transformational change, be verifiable and should be short and memorable.

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> The governance theme Organisation

Establishing a clear and effective organisation is critical to programme success. Ensuring that the Programme Organisation meets the needs of the programme is both an initial and ongoing task.

Effective Programme Organisation requires a combination of defines roles, clear responsibilities and management structures together with reporting arrangements that are needed to deliver the programme’s desired outcomes.

Programme management is most effective when issues are debated freely and risks are evaluated openly. This requires a leadership style and culture that encourages the flow of information between the projects and the programme. Every opportunity to advance the programme towards its goals should be welcomed and converted into constructive progress.

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> The Governance Themes

Governance is the control framework through which programmes deliver their change objectives and remain within corporate visibility and control. The programme’s control framework needs to be integrated with the corporate governance framework of the organisation, using the organisation’s existing governance and control frameworks wherever they exist.

MSP describes nine Governance Themes, each of which details the consistent controls needed to manage the programme.

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> Stakeholder Analysis is a vital tool for identifying those people, groups and organisations who have influence and interest in specific programme interest areas. Clear understanding of the potential influence and interest of the many different stakeholders is a fundamental prerequisite for successful programme management, so stakeholder analysis is a basic tool for achieving this understanding. Stakeholder analysis is a prerequisite for defining a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy.

To ensure a proper mode of engagement , the analysis should examine and identify stakeholders by their influence towards the programme outcome and their importance & power for the programme. The analysis can be done in various dimensions.  
For example, the analysis could separately identify relevant stakeholder groups and interests within the public sector, within the private sector, and within social and community sectors etc…
In addition, the analysis can seek out potential stakeholders to ensure proper representation in relation to gender, ethnicity, poverty, or other locally relevant criterion.
Cutting across these categories, the analysis can also look at stakeholders in terms of their information, expertise and resources applicable to the issue.

Stakeholder analysis by itself only identifies relevant stakeholders, key players. A Stakeholder Engagement Strategy will deal with the question: “How will the programme effectively engage with the stakeholders?”

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Continue reading » No related posts.]]> The projects dossier is a summary description of all the projects and their outputs. The projects together will deliver the required future state as described in the programme’s blueprint.
The projects dossier contain information about existing projects as well as information about the projects that still have to start. So he Projects Dossier also shows work that will be in place at programme start-up.

The projects dossier contains the following information:

• a description of the project, including its outputs (products) and timescales (schedule);
• the contribution it will make to benefit realisation (part of the projects business case);
• risk related information, the acceptable risk threshold as well as the contribution to the overall programme’s risk.

The above information should be part of the project brief of a project when starting up project (Prince2 process). In the ideal situatin, for the programme, the project brief is created by the programme. This makes it more easy to align the projects and to keep track of the outputs and risks.

The projects dossier is a way to try to create structure in the interdependencies between projects and to minimise the numer of interdependencies between the projects by delineate the projects in an efficient way. Because all projects within a dossier may be interlinked, each of the individual project boundaries needs to be carefully thought of.

Delineating the projects can be done in various ways:

• By discipline. Organise the projects about the various disciplines needed to deliver the capability needed for the programme. So there can be an ICT project, a facility management project, a project for personel aspects….etc..
• By location. The approach by discipline can work out very fine if all the work can be done within one location or when culture is not hampering the cooperation. but things change when the programme has to deal with sevarl locations. So that is when you might consider to delineate your project by location. Multi site or multi location projects are more difficult to manage. Projects may be scoped by grouping activities that can be achieved on a single site.
• By outputs. Projects are defined with the focus on the products to be delivered. This is my favourite way for delineating projects.

The projects have to be effective in order to achieve to required outputs. In order to be effective consider the following:

• Divide a big change (projects) in smaller portions (smaller projects).
• Combine work in small packages into one project.
• Consider the skills, knowledge, technology and facilities that are likeliy to be available.
• Maintain the existing team-working arrangements (never change a winning team).
• Multi location projects can be difficult to manage due to communication problems and different cultures.

Critical inputs for the projects dossier are derived from the Blueprint and the delivery.

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