How do you do Benefit Realisation Management
If you are involved in change within your organisation and you:
Want to increase the value delivered from change
Recognise the fundamental difference between delivering capability and delivering benefits
Want to use a pro-active approach to managing and realising those benefits
Want to promote and develop benefit management in your organisation
Then you will know the importance of having a structured approach to managing those benefits to focus on their realisation and not just the delivery of capability.
Benefit realisation management is an organisational capability which embraces this fundamental shift in focus from capability delivery to business benefit realisation and at its core is focused on the four step process shown in the diagram below.
Benefits Identification
Benefits Analysis
& Definition
Benefits Planning
Benefits Realisation
How to do benefits realisation management:
Identify the benefits:This can be considered in two ways.
The first way is to consider what the overall goals/ objectives are and identify what benefits need to be realised to achieve these – this can be considered as the ‘right to left’ or ‘benefits led change’ identification approach where objectives are on the right and capability is on the left. This approach could be used to inform a business case justifying the change and investment required against the benefits (and disbenefits) and objectives. This represents an ideal situation where you are able to start from the overall objectives.
The second way is to start from the enablers (capabilities, features etc) which are being delivered and identify the benefits these could enable – this is the ‘left to right’ or ‘change led benefits’ identification approach. This could be used where a change is already in progress and you need to identify potential benefits (and disbenefits) that could be realised from them.
The outputs from this stage would be a pictorial representation in the form of a benefit map and/or a list of benefits.
Define the benefits:This step is to develop the detailed definition of the benefits identified. Amongst the questions answered in this step are;
What is the benefit description?
How will it be measured
What are the baseline and target dimensions for that measurement?
Plan for benefit realisation:This step is focused on the development of a plan for each benefit and would include:
The schedule for benefit realisation
The identification of individuals and/or forums that need to be involved and their role and responsibilities.
When benefit reviews will be held
Who would be the formal sign-off authority for each benefit
Realise the benefits:This step involves:
The execution of the benefit realisation plan
Managing the realisation to ensure that benefits are maximised
Any unplanned benefits or disbenefits are identified and managed.
The output from this stage would be realised benefits.
The output from this stage would be benefit profile.
The output from this stage would be benefit realisation plan.
The benefit realisation management process is simple and logical: Identify and define the benefits
you want to achieve, plan for them and then realise them.
You may see this process – or a variant of it - depicted as a loop and certainly it is a bit more complicated then the simple linear process shown. There will be overlaps and feedback between the steps e.g. as you develop the definition of a benefit it may give you insight which leads to a review of the benefits identified.
However it is fundamentally a simple and logical process that can be applied to any change initiative.