Project Success Re-imagined – Part 3
ValuePoint works with the TOP methodology as part of our value delivery management approach, including the groundbreaking TOP Value Equation: a structured and intuitive process set helping organizations maximise project benefits and business value that in turn drive successful project deliveries.
Chances are you clicked through on a link to come read more about the process for defining project business outcomes. Thanks for that!
In this series of articles we go through each of the steps of the TOP Value Equation process.
If you haven’t read the first two articles covering the use of Business Outcomes and Outcome Roadmaps, you can find the articles here:
https://valuepoint.dk/project-success-re-imagined-the-power-of-business-outcomes/
https://valuepoint.dk/project-success-re-imagined-part-two/
Recap & background
We talk with people in the field regularly, and even after 25+ years focus on improving project deliveries, we find the same conversation takes place again and again. We should know better by now, right?
At the crux of the conversation is that seasoned project managers are highly professional at delivering what’s being asked of them. There are popular project management methodologies, common language, and reporting templates, etc. – all good, except that the most important project deliverable is often out of scope and pushed to the side, untracked, unmanaged and unaccounted for as the technical delivery takes focus.
That’s benefits.
Talk with people in the business – PMOs, C-Level, Project Managers, Portfolio Management teams – and though you’ll often find brave faces among them, when you dig down into it the truth comes out that there’s a lot of uncertainty around ‘getting the benefits’ and how to track and manage their delivery.
In the previous two articles (linked above), we cover the creation of business outcomes and outcomes roadmaps, and how using them allows projects to focus on real business deliverables (the business outcomes) and enable projects managers, Steering Committees and all other stakeholders to track project progress from a business vantage point.
The profound shift this represents cannot be understated.
Once a project defines its business outcomes, the next critical step is to identify the project benefits.
Bringing Projects to Life: Using Business Outcomes to Identify Benefits
So, you’ve got your initial project business outcome statements, and you’ve assembled them into an outcomes roadmap. The direction is set, stakeholders have their delivery target, though note that the roadmap and outcomes are often tweaked during the Benefits Identification and Change Activities Identification processes. It’s to be expected and it’s a GOOD thing – keep tweaking the business outcomes until they are just right. A word here or there can make a huge difference.
The Benefits Identification Workshop:
A Fast & Powerful Process Encore
The very good news: Identifying benefits using business outcomes is easy and intuitive.
Step 1: Identify the Right Stakeholders
The best people to involve? It’s essentially the same stakeholders who gathered to define the business outcomes, and perhaps an SME or two that have operational insights based on hands-on daily work. In a nutshell, it’s those who:
- Have an intimate understanding of the improvements the project will bring, and will be able to assess what benefits will be enabled
- Are best positioned to drive delivery of those benefits within the organization
Step 2: Run the Benefits Identification Workshop
Shortly after concluding on the initial draft of your project’s outcomes and outcomes roadmap, schedule a 2-3 hour workshop – which is most often all it takes. Alternatively, you can work directly with the key stakeholders of each outcome in separate meetings, following the description in 1. below.
Note: the earlier business value is defined, the earlier the benefits are identified, the easier it is to position them side-by-side the outcomes as the core of the project. There is no such thing as, “It’s too early to talk about benefits”.
The structured process for identifying benefits includes the following elements:
- On an outcome-by-outcome basis, work with those stakeholders and SMEs with the most insight into the delivery of that specific outcome. There’s little to be achieved by having the ‘wrong’ people partaking in a specific outcome’s benefits identification process.
- Run through a pre-defined set of benefit types and how the delivery of the specific outcome may trigger a potential benefit. This typically and quickly identifies an unusually large number of benefits, which is the advantage of using a structured and well-defined process for this purpose. No stone goes unturned.
- Once your initial outcome benefits are identified, ensure they conform to a principled statement that answers these questions:
What is the nature of the benefit?
What is being benefitted?
How are they benefitting?
By how much are they benefitting?
For example:
Increased use of the on-line customer service portal reduces the need for Customer Service live phone services by 40%.
The Result?
Once completing the identification of each of the outcome’s benefits you will have in hand a benefit set that is ready to be prioritized, quantified (= specify the business value of the benefit), and embedded into the scope of the project delivery. In this way, business outcomes and benefit business value become the project driver and the measuring stick of a successful project delivery.
In general, using the TOP process to identify benefits is easy to execute, quick, effective, and gets you lots of benefits to choose from. As emphasised elsewhere (and often), getting project benefits front and centre at the earliest stages of the analysis phase will result in these positive impacts:
- Stakeholder alignment early in the project cycle
- A mature and meaningful business case submission
- Project focus on benefits realisation in the execution phase
Next Up
You probably noticed that identifying the benefits is a first step in a project’s benefit ‘arena’.
In the next articles, we will get into:
- Prioritising your identified benefits
- Quantifying your chosen benefits (= specify their projected business value)
- Accountability and managing benefits realisation as part of project governance and the project lifecycle
If you’re ready to go even deeper here and now, reach out, give us call and let’s talk. 🚀