Benefits Management

A key benefit of a Method Grid account is the Method Grid Store – a growing collection of free grids that cover a number of common, repeatable business situations and practice areas. This week sees an update to our project and program management (PPM) grid – bringing the Benefits Management theme up to date (with related guidance and control elements).

This update follows earlier, incremental updates to this major grid: PPM methodology framework and the project governance framework theme.

You can find out more about this project and program management methodology here.

In this latest update, we have added a benefits management theme to the PPM framework.

As seasoned project and program managers will know, the fundamental reason for undertaking any project or program is to realise benefits for the recipient organisation. Unfortunately, experience suggests that projects and programs, whilst delivering change, often fail to deliver the business benefits they set out to achieve.

This latest addition to our project and program management (PPM) grid outlines the basis for a simple benefits management process: to help ensure that projects and programmes, managed through such a framework, succeed in delivering the benefits set out in the business case.

Per the overall grid, our content is aligned to such established standards as PRINCE2 and Managing Successful Programmes (MSP). Even if you are unfamiliar with such standards, the guidance talks to accepted tenets of benefits management “best practice”:

• To provide alignment and clear links between the Program/Project, its vision and the desired outcomes;
• To identify the wider impact of any changed capability including side effects, and dis-benefits;
• To ensure benefit realisation is tracked and documented so achievements are properly identified and recognised; and
• To encourage ownership amongst the stakeholders for specific aspects of the program in order to add value through the benefits realisation process.

Our new theme provides a detailed c.18 page guidance document on this aspect and five detailed control “elements” that can be harnessed during the life-cycle of a program/project. These control elements include detailed guidance and templates for: a benefits management strategy, benefits profiles and a benefits realisation plan.

Figure: Snapshot of overarching PPM grid: a rich “starting point” framework on which to develop your own organisational reference point

Figure: Illustrative element within the new benefits management theme

It should be noted that this example grid – which we will continue to build out – can serve as a really helpful “starter point” for developing your own bespoke organisational transformation methodology. Leading organisations recognise that change is an ever-present dynamic for continued success and, therefore transformation professionalism needs to be embedded into their core capabilities (from the board down).

The Method Grid platform serves as an optimal home for such a framework.

Method Grid facilitates the capture/presentation of structured resources and the continuous-improvement effort (again, leading organisations recognise that this discipline never stands still: there are always new “best practice” artefacts to add to your master methodology, improved templates, new subject matter experts etc).

For readers new to the solution, the key point to note about Method Grid is that it – somewhat uniquely – helps tackle two related organisational “pain points”:

Pain Point (1): Your team have no common “way of working”, they struggle to quickly find the right template/tool/example/colleague-expert, they constantly “reinvent the wheel” and lose valuable productivity trying to make sense of a badly-organised shared drive.

Resolution: Method Grid‘s knowledge management enablement – puts all the latest “how to” resources at the fingertips of your team – facilitating knowledge leaders in the act of building and refining organisational methodology.

Pain Point (2): Your team attempt to deliver projects/programs with a disparate set of productivity tools. At best, you have a satisfactory project/task management solution – but it has no integrated link with your “how to” resources.

Resolution: Method Grid‘s project management enablement – enabling you to build on your captured methodology with a suite of project tracking, quality assurance and executive dashboard tools. This aspect of the solution is forever improving (see recorded webinar for a description of the major release now being worked on).

The integration of knowledge management and the project management component is critical: it allows project-orientated staff to have single sign in access to both the resources/guidance to do their jobs – and – productivity/task enablement to successfully deliver and track the execution of a live, real-world rendition of this method.

So there you have it: this latest benefits management update adds another core theme to our PPM starter grid – a grid that can serve as the foundation of a deep, valuable resource for your firm.

Watch out for future release iterations that further build out the PPM grid content.

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