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I attended the Benefits Realisation Summit in Sydney earlier this week and the area of discussion I found most interesting was around the roles and responsibilities of the different managers involved in realising benefits and creating value. As a starting point there was a very good definition of the stages involved in creating value, based on the concept of developing a new retail shop:
The realisation of the value outlined above requires a ‘chain’ of decisions and management actions:
Within all of these stages, the key to creating the intended value is effective benefits management; this is the focus of the Managing Benefits book and the objective of the Benefits Realisation Summit.
Maximising the benefits realised from a project or program is not a solo effort, it requires the effective cooperation of a number of managers with defined roles and responsibilities operating effectively as a team:
Each of the managers above has a distinct role to play:
Change management and project management are different skills requiring different training and different personality types. Both roles are critical and should support the sponsor in achieving the best possible transition of the project’s outputs into operations.
During the life of the project the project manager is assisted by the change manger to ensure the project delivers the most useful output, the change manger also works on preparing the organisation for the change. The focus is creating the ‘right’ outputs as efficiently as possible and this is primarily a project management function.
During the critical transition phase the focus changes, the project manager’s role should shift to focus on helping the change manger to ensure the projects deliverables ‘work’ in the organisational setting. The project manager will also be working on project closure during this period but this should be secondary to ensuring the planned benefits are capable of being realised.
Throughout the whole process, the change manger is primarily responsible for facilitating the organisational change aspects of the initiative including of all of the processes involved in embedding the new product, process or service within the organisation and supporting its adoption through to the point where it is functioning as a normal part of the organisation’s ‘business-as-usual’ capabilities. This may require some level of support for two or three years after the project has finished.
Programs are created to manage the work of several projects in a coordinated way, may include some operational work for a period and many are set up specifically created as organisational change agents. The different types of program are outlined in this article.
If a project is a component of a program, the program manager is responsible for creating the project and is usually acts as the project’s sponsor. The program is responsible for the change management processes as part of its core integration and coordination functions and the program sponsor has overall responsibility for the return on investment in the program.
The concept of a Benefits Manager is relatively new. The Benefits Manager provides a benefits realisation support service to sponsors, program managers, change managers and benefits owners. Some of the functions include:
This is an important role both from the facilitation perspective and the assurance perspective. People with a vested interest in the value of benefits proposed or realised should not be the people measuring their value; this is an untenable conflict of interest. The Benefits Manager provides independent assurance that the benefits proposed in the benefits realisation plan have been achieved to the extent defined in the plan, at the time defined in the plan and any variances are identified and explained or understood.
Benefits cannot be managed directly; they are a consequence of other management actions and decisions. An organisation will maximise the benefits actually realised by maintaining a focus on benefits from the early stages of project initiation right through to the point where they are fully realised by the operations of the changed organisation.
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