5 Steps to Gain Commitment to Deliver Business Benefits

Have you ever struggled to get an agreement on the benefits required? Fought to get badly needed tracking data?

Let’s go through the five steps to help you turn this around.

Ideally, this step starts early. Before starting a project, change or contacting potential suppliers. If you have already started, it’s okay to do it as a ‘benefits reset’ activity.

Get together a list of important benefits and measures. To do this, you need people, but who?

Who can represent the business on what good should look like? Who is senior and has an opinion on the benefits they would like to see reported on regularly?

Work with them to agree to a list of potential benefits and measures. Go through those used before and add any missing. A ‘master set’ of benefits and measures is a massive help. But, if you don’t have one, this is a good opportunity to start creating this.

For each benefit and measure, categorise them as either:

1. Not relevant.
2. Relevant to plan for, but no need to report on.
3. Relevant to plan for and need to report on.

This categorised list is part of what we call a ‘Benefits Scorecard’. It shows all the benefits and measures nicely categorised as either Not Relevant, Relevant & No Reporting, and Relevant & Reporting. These are the initial benefit thoughts and wishes of senior people representing the business for the initiative.

What a wonderful thing to have!

You can now communicate clearly the types of business benefits needed from an initiative. These can be discussed with, for example, potential suppliers and project and change managers.
Also shared as part of a business case and requests for proposals. What is in and out of scope? All the business benefits are provided to avoid doubt.

Benefit measures do not need specific targets at this step. They set expectations for what is valuable to impact and report on without the need for specifics. The detail will come soon enough!

Where these requirements for planning and reporting are referred to in documents, you can add these references to the benefits scorecard.
For example, one customer uses benefit scorecards with supplier contracts. To refer to the parts of the document that the benefits and measures are in. This helps massively to make sure that they have been formally shared. They also help with the next steps.

This step educates your potential suppliers and delivery teams on why the initiative is needed and their future obligations. They can then plan to meet their benefits planning and reporting commitments. It won’t be a surprise!

Now a proposal or business case has been accepted. The detail is being agreed upon. The implications of planning for and reporting on the benefits become real.

The targets for the benefits to be measured now need to be agreed upon as much as possible. This is where the cost/benefit analysis comes into its own.

• It may cost half the amount to have a 90% reduction in carbon emissions than to reduce them by 95%.
• It may need an extra two people to gather data for a specific measure.
• Benefit measurement data may not be relevant to collect for the first six months as teams slowly build and outputs and capabilities start to emerge.

Is each benefit and measure worth the extra cost being taken on? Is the value of the benefit for the cost worth it?
You agree on what is worth committing to and when to do it.

By following this process early, there are no surprises for the team or supplier delivering the initiative. Responsibilities for reporting and accountabilities for targets are agreed upon before the work commences, and costs are agreed upon.

I can’t stress enough the pressure this takes off those managing business benefits and outcomes.
The result of this step is that agreements around benefits are formalised. Costs, effort and resources needed are known and agreed to.

But, life and priorities change.

Priorities and contracts will change when work is underway. Unexpected events will emerge, dates and scope will change, as will delivery costs.
The business will introduce critical new benefits and measures. They may apply to this initiative.
Existing benefits and measures will be retired as no longer necessary. You can remove commitments around them for this initiative.

This step is to keep the benefits scorecard updated.

Reviewing and updating agreements and the benefits scorecard every three months, for example, is essential. If there are good and acceptable reasons for these to change, they should change.

One customer uses a benefits scorecard as part of contract reviews. It is used by those in the contract and commercial teams as a reference in reviews, alongside someone representing business benefit management.

So, the result of this is more than updated documentation. It keeps everyone focused on planning to deliver needed benefits on reporting the actual benefits. To only spend time, cost and effort on the essential activities. To increase the impact of initiatives on business success.

How does this all end?

At the end of an initiative, you will know how did the project, portfolio, team and suppliers perform in terms of business benefits delivered.

You will have the data on the ‘measures that matter’ to feedback successes. None of it will be a surprise, but great to replay the ups and downs of the benefit journey to close an initiative off.

The benefits scorecard is great for lessons learned. Each time a benefits scorecard is used, it will become easier and an essential part of managing performance.

CONCLUSION

With a greater shift to getting greater benefits and value from investments, benefit scorecards are an essential tool. These five steps will help you to reduce uncertainty, communicate clearly and manage outcomes together.

The result is more impactful projects and contracts.

Planning, tracking, and reporting benefits become easier, with agreements up-front before work is committed. If you have not done this before, then introduce it to initiatives as part of a ‘Benefits reset’ process.

With Benefits Scorecards, those benefits your organisation wants are more likely to be delivered and reported on with these five steps.

Wovex supports Benefit Scorecards and a centralised set of benefits and measures. If you’d like to know more, then schedule a call.