The End Game - Benefits Realisation

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Welcome to another episode of Transformation professionals, sponsored by CxO Transform, crafted to enhance the strategic acumen of ambitious managers, leaders and consultants. We hope you enjoy this episode About Benefits Realization here's Rob Llewellyn.

The onus of reaping benefits from technological investments squarely falls on the business itself. Merely implementing technology is not enough to guarantee success. At the very least, comprehensive training and robust support are essential to ensure users can effectively utilize new digital tools. The wealth of lessons learned from past experiences cannot be overlooked to extract the fullest value. The convergence of technology with process and business modifications is crucial alongside the business's adept utilization of the insights that technology yields. While a project might deliver technological advancements and process alterations, the business must own the changes required to enhance performance and actualize the benefits that is the essence of business responsibility. For all key stakeholders within the business to sign up to the benefits, it's essential they understand their business responsibilities for defining and executing business changes and measuring measuring performance improvements in their business areas. Key to this is continued business involvement. The business needs to be involved in identifying the potential benefits to be gained from an initiative, and ideally this starts with digital use cases, then the business case. This should include defining the scope of technology, process change, and business change necessary to deliver the benefits. Because of the general lack of knowledge and understanding about benefit realization, it's very important that a Ray C matrix is established and communicated, leaving no room for ambiguity. It should be clear to everyone who is responsible for undertaking an activity, accountable for ensuring that the activity is undertaken satisfactorily, consulted in conjunction with the activity, and informed as the activity progresses. Without the race, it's almost certain that people will begin making incorrect assumptions about who's doing what, and sooner or later the benefits realization effort will run into trouble. Every transformation should have a set of tools and proven techniques to manage the business benefits, which should be evident at every stage of the transformation. And it's important to remember that value is not just about financial benefits. It's about any improvement which is perceived as being beneficial by stakeholders, which could be financial, measurable, quantity, quantifiable, or observable. Benefits are often colorfully painted in business cases to secure funding. But once those funds are secured, the very people who did a splendid job of selling the benefits to those who held the keys to the budget sometimes pay little if any attention to benefits management. They promise value in the business case, get the money they need, but then fail to measure the value. The business case should be supported by a benefits management strategy which does more than just explain the activities, time and resources needed needed to achieve a set of benefits. It should describe the process that will be used for monitoring, realizing, and assessing benefits and contain relationships and dependencies between the changes and benefits. Other content would address a dependency network and criteria to assess whether benefits have been achieved and how they should be quantified. This will serve to build stakeholder confidence and trust from the outset. Once the transformation has been kicked off, a benefits plan should be consistently and proactively managed and monitored with a set of tools and proven techniques. Benefits management takes more than a financial spreadsheet and a list of benefits sitting on a timeline, and it should also involve extensive communication. As with every aspect of transformation, under communication is often at the root of many issues, so plan for extensive pictures, charts, maps and diagrams that will resonate with stakeholders far better than verbose documents and spreadsheets. The benefits management strategy should define the approach to realizing benefits and the framework within which the benefits realization will be achieved. Methods for identifying, mapping, monitoring and reviewing benefits Scope and explanation of which areas of the business will be covered by benefits management and realization activity measurement methods and processes to monitor and assess the realization of benefits success factors against which the effectiveness of benefits management should be measured tools, systems and sources of information to enable measurement descriptions of function, roles, accountabilities and responsibilities for benefit planning and realization priorities of benefit types relationships between capabilities and benefits opportunities to be managed in relationship to risk management clarification of benefits related terminology appropriate to the organization and a review and assessment process for measuring benefits realization. A benefits realization plan should be designed to track the realization of benefits across the transformation portfolio and set review controls. It should contain detailed benefits mapped to illustrate sequential relationships between benefits. Schedule detailing when each benefit, disbenefit or group of benefits will be realized milestones for benefit reviews estimated effort and costs associated with the plan detail of transition schedules, benefit reporting schedule and relationships with program outcomes dependencies external to the program handover and embedding activities to enhance the process of benefits realization after delivery of a capability and details of how benefits realization will be maintained after program closure. Investment is made to make transformation happen which should be to provide value. Those who ignore the concept of value management and benefit realization management are essentially neglecting the very purpose of the transformation. Three key questions stakeholders should ask what does the benefits management strategy look like? What does the benefits management plan look like? And who is executing the benefits management plan, no matter who the tasks are assigned to? The accountability for value and benefits management rests with the digital business transformation manager in an ideal scenario they would appoint a dedicated individual focused solely on managing and realizing the value and benefits.

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