As a program manager it's your responsibility to deliver benefits to the organization.
So what is a benefit you might ask.
Well that can be defined as a measurable improvement as perceived by stakeholders which contributes
towards organizational objectives
before I go on to talk about benefits.
Let's have a look at what work is on what work is not.
There's a really good book which I recommend reading called the Phoenix projects and then here it has
a really profound statement about work.
In fact that work in itself has no inherent value.
Work will happen for work say it will just fill a void and work actually needs to be directed in order
to realize the benefits.
In fact if it's not directed efficiently or effectively it can actually be detrimental.
It's particularly detrimental to other areas of the business so benefits arise when it enables people
to do things differently or enables people to do things more efficiently and effectively.
That's when you're going to see benefits all work projects have outcomes but not all outcomes are beneficial.
So for these reasons the benefits have to be managed and it's worth remembering that you're not going
to see those benefits materialize until further down the program management lifecycle.
There's going to be some starts off and it's going to take some time for the benefits to be realized
but then the benefits will begin to be realized and then the program might actually get shut down and
it moves into ordinary operations.
But it's important to remember to keep managing the benefits throughout those operations.
We'll talk more about that when we look at the benefits to cost ratio
so there's five stages to setting benefits.
First on bean ID and quantifying the benefits.
Then there's evaluating and an appraising the benefits plan in realizing the benefits and review.
Now the program manager might be involved in all of those stages or the program manager might simply
come in at the planning stage.
The benefits might be set by the organization and given to the program manager in order to deliver
so the five stages can be enabled by Well firstly thinking the benefits have to be aligned with the
strategy.
So if the benefits are aligned with the strategy then there's simply not going to deliver the strategy
that the organization needs.
So that's really important that the benefits align with the strategy.
It's a good tip is to start with the end in mind to think about what the benefit needs to achieve and
then work backwards from that.
Now one way to do this is to think about where you are at the moment where you want to be and then what
you need to do in order to get the another top tip is to utilize the successful delivery methods.
Now there's many delivery methods that you can use which sets out best practices too which are very
familiar to people are Prince to project management for delivering projects and then for development
of software in an agile way.
Agile is a delivery method that could be utilized but there's many different delivery methods so it's
worth spending some time to familiarize yourself with them and the tools that they bring.
For work management to see which one fits the benefit that you're trying to deliver and choose that
and then look at the best practices and use that as a method for delivery another top step is to integrate
benefits with performance and performance management particularly on the individual level.
So on the performance reviews of individuals it's good to put in our line the benefits of their individual
performance.
This helps make sure that everybody that's working within the portfolio and the projects are aligned
with the benefits that it's trying to achieve even on an individual level.
It's also important to make sure that you apply the right governance and that the right governance bodies
are set up and your report into the right governance and also that those governance bodies are clear
about who is responsible for what part and also to develop a value culture now a culture of change would
be good because you are implementing change so it's important to make sure that people value change
and also people take benefit management seriously so that you can deliver the benefits in in a culture
which will support benefit management so let's take a look at the first part of the benefits five stages.