Projects are run by organisations so that they can gain benefits from them – that’s pretty obvious to all of us. However, during project planning these benefits may not be well defined. But by tying the realisation of project benefits to project outcomes you can avoid situations where the end result does not meet the business requiremenst. Making it easier to achieve and prove the success of your project.
What is a project benefit?
This is an outcome that gives value, utility or even a positive change to the recipient – be that a single department, customers, an organisation or whole industry. These intended recipients are the project stakeholders. A benefit is not the same as a project deliverable or product. A project may result in the delivery of a new building, a new process or a new system. However, that is a strategic investment in order to produce a benefit for someone or something.
How are project benefits measured?
There are a number of ways in which a project benefit may be measured. It could be a financial one, this can be easily measured. It might be a more tangible improvement in the quality of a service which needs little effort to measure, or it may be something intangible such as customer satisfaction or employee morale.
Every benefit type matters and every benefit type should be realised. It can be difficult, but it is possible to measure the different types of benefits if prior to the start of the project you create a baseline and then plan how and when your measurements will occur and who will take them.
What is the difference between the objectives, deliverables and benefits of a project?
The simplest way to explain the difference between project benefits, objectives and deliverables is to consider some practical examples.
Let’s consider the benefits for a Property Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system within a range of different organisation types. The majority of organisations will need to manage property in some form, so this makes it easier to apply them to other forms of project.
ERP benefits for a property investment company
Let’s take as an example a company which has a portfolio of properties: office, retail and residential. Currently it uses a number of different systems for the different parts of a portfolio. Some of the key challenges are poor data integration, manual consolidation of financial statements, systems with steep learning curves, and people working in silos. Phew! That’s really not helping with productivity.
Project objectives
The over-riding objectives of this type of project should be to implement an ERP system that merges databases, creates common views of data and streamlines financial processes.
It should be possible to implement a single system that has the ability to capture a full inventory of all the property and buildings, whilst also creating the capability to add any equipment and assets over time.
Project deliverables
There are a number of different project deliverables that should also be considered and appropriate delivery dates should be assigned them. These include data cleansing and migration, the redesign and documentation of business processes and the configuration of ERP modules. These should also be tested live. Finally, you’ll need to arrange the closing down of any old systems with critical data being archived.
Project benefits
There are many benefits to this type of projects for both employees and the organisation as a whole. One example might be that employees have the option to lodge service requests online for every building from a single system.
You could also have the option to have maintenance plans in place for all of the buildings and properties. And, as an additional example, flag up buildings where there are health and safety alerts to ensure no employees are present.
For this type of project you might also expect to be able to significantly reduce the time required to create monthly reports. This will have the knock-on effect of reducing your month end financial close. This will improve employee confidence in the data and could potentially help make the switch from a monthly to daily bank reconciliation system.
ERP benefits for a not-for-profit organisation
Let’s look at another example, in this case a not-for-profit that owns and operates a number of community facilities. These properties might include youth centres, offices, halls, and social housing. It is likely that they may be using spreadsheets, outdated databases and even small business accounting systems. If they want to be able to rent out space on a commercial basis to gain funds and manage their use of space better, then they need a solid plan.
Project objectives
The objectives of this project should be the implementation of an ERP system to manage the properties and integrate property information with a space booking system. They should also be looking to minimise or remove the use of spreadsheets and the old database.
Project deliverables
To begin the process, it is important to make sure that all data is cleansed and then it can be migrated by a set date.
Data cleansing is simply the process of identifying and correcting errors, inconsistencies, and irrelevant information in a dataset.
It is also important to accurately identify any space that is available to be rented out within certain date and time-slots; and ensure this is added to a booking system. All parts of the ERP should be configured, tested and then made live on the system as soon as possible. The last required step is to ensure that you have the booking system and the financial systems linked.
Project benefits
In this instance the benefits to the property team could be provided through a simple, integrated dashboard. This will link property data, financial data and also space utilisation data to make bookings easier and more reliable. You might also want to include a future benefit of, say, increasing bookings by x% 1 year after the new system is implemented.
How and when do I plan for benefits realisation?
Benefits realisation should be planned up front and documented in the project business case. If you don’t have a business case then plan the project benefits and benefits realisation during project scoping and record them in the Project Charter or Project Management Plan or other key project planning document. Projects are a vehicle for implementing a new strategy and a benefits realisation plan aligns your project to your organisation’s strategy.
