Taking Responsibility for Benefits Realization
Deborah Bigelow Crawford has more than 20 years of experience in business management and handles the operational and administrative functions of PM Solutions. Ms. Bigelow Crawford also serves as Co-CEO of the PM College®, PM Solutions' training division, where she is responsible for the fiscal management and quality assurance of all training and professional development programs. Prior to joining PM Solutions, she served as the Executive Director of the Project Management Institute (PMI), and was instrumental in providing the foundation and infrastructure for the exponential growth that the Institute has maintained over the last 10 years. In addition, she served as the Executive Director of the PMI Educational Foundation. Over the last decade, she has authored numerous articles in PM Network, Chief Project Officer, and Optimize magazines. Ms. Bigelow Crawford is also co-author of the book Project Management Essentials. She has presented a variety of papers as a speaker at international symposia and conferences, and is a member of the National Association of Female Executives and the Project Management Institute.
It's always rewarding when the audience at a presentation responds with enthusiasm and wants to know more! That was the situation at my Benefits Realization Management (BRM) presentation at the PMI Global Conference. I spent last week responding personally to the dozens of attendees who requested tools, templates and other information. Now I'd like to get this same message out to a wider audience, so I'll be writing a blogs on the topic over the next few weeks.
One of the hot button issues in BRM is, who's responsible? In one of PMI's first research publications on BRM a few years ago, they noted that the majority of organizations were simply adding BRM tasks to the project manager's kitchen-sink job description. Besides being a strategy that seriously short-changes the importance of benefits realization, this elicits a collective groan from an audience of project managers!
Combining insights from British organizations, where BRM is more mature, with our own experience, we have developed a role description for the BRM manager that stresses the "stewardship" nature of the position. That is, the BRM manager is not responsible for the benefit outcomes, but stewards the process, ensuring effective approaches to benefits management are applied to all projects across the portfolio. This includes ensuring that benefits are planned and tracked. The BRM manager identifies critical dependencies and/or enablers to realizing benefits, works through these with the relevant benefit owners, and ensures that benefit owners are held accountable for specific benefit attainment. Ideally, this role would reports to a portfolio manager or PMO director. Some additional responsibilities might include:
- Facilitates benefits discovery workshop on critical projects
- Identifies and quantifies benefits with the support of business managers
- Reviews business cases to ensure overall cost-benefit positions are reliable
- Drafts benefits maps, and garners stakeholder agreement
- Ensure the benefit profiles and benefit maps for each project are approved by stakeholders
- Develops benefits register for each project
- Works with business change managers to identify and leverage emergent benefits
- Works with business change manager to minimize dis-benefits
- Assesses change requests for their impact on benefits realization.
- Monitors dependencies and the enabling and business changes on which benefits realization is dependent
- Ensures that transition for tracking benefits post project is in wbs
- Advises the sponsor on business readiness for transition
- Engages stakeholders to ensure change is implemented smoothly
- Monitors successful transition and checks that all required project outputs/deliverables and business changes occur so that benefits are realized
- Monitors and reports on benefits realization throughout the initiative’s life, including emergent benefits and dis-benefits
- Reports on benefits realization progress and revised forecasts to the portfolio manager/pmo director and ensure benefits management practices are adapted to reflect lesson learned.
Wow. That's a lot ... another reason this isn't just an add-on to the already busy project manager job. Instead, companies need to look for specific types of skills and knowledge to be sure they are delivering the benefits envisioned by their strategic initiatives: We suggest:
- A Master’s degree with 5-10 years’ experience in project/portfolio management
- Solid understanding of benefits realization
- Ability to build, lead, and influence team to achieve common goal
- Strong management, organization, and business skills
- Business planning and budgeting skills
On the interpersonal side, the ideal BRM manager should be intuitive and flexible as well as able to display sound judgment based on facts. The effictive BRM will be able to communicate with colleagues up and down the orgtanization, but especially have good rapport with executives in order to translate the project and program management successes and hurdles as benefits are identified and tracked througout the life cycle ... and beyond.
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