This post answers the following questions: “What are program benefits?”. “What is Benefits Realization?” and “How are benefits relevant and important for programs?”
Benefits Realization involves the formal identification and quantification of benefits that the program is expected to bring to the enterprise or sponsoring organization. “Benefits” can be defined as a business value that can be quantified by the stakeholders or at a minimum value that is clearly tangible, and easy to observe and understand. So, it’s a concept that transcends that of producing deliverables and achieving certain types of milestones unless they collectively can be expressed in terms of real value for the business. It may be that certain deliverables may individually result in concrete benefits for the program or in other cases multiple deliverables from different projects may collectively result in a benefit.
PMI’s “Standard for Program Management”, defines a ‘benefit’ as follows:
“an outcome of actions, behaviors, products, or services that provide utility to the sponsoring organization as well as to the program’s beneficiaries.”
So, rather than solely focusing on a program’s deliverables, a benefits realization plan ensures that the program manager and the overall program team stays focused on the business benefits that a program is meant to deliver regardless of the milestones. Anytime during the execution of the program, if the program doesn’t appear to deliver those benefits, the program manager should alert its sponsors and stakeholders, who in turn then have the choice of altering the direction of the program.
One of the primary PMI themes is that a program differs from a project in that a program creates benefits for the organization, whereas those benefits are aligned with an organization’s overall strategy. Based on what we as practitioners observe in real life, this principle has become a truism within the program management field.
As a program is focused on delivering benefits throughout its lifecycle, benefits are realized over time and it’s the program manager’s job to ensure that such benefits realization is planned, controlled and tracked to ensure that benefits are delivered to the sponsoring organization.
To ensure that benefits are realized for a program, the program manager must ensure the following:
- Benefits are defined at a higher level
- Benefits are agreed upon by stakeholders
- Benefits realization and delivery is planned by the program manager at the beginning of the program
- Benefits delivery is tracked during the program lifecycle
- A process is instituted that for the delivery and communication of benefits
- Appropriate metrics are defined that can track benefits delivery.
Benefits realization management is one of the key domains within the PgMP certification and a program manager is expected to excel in this domain to be certified as a PgMP professional.
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Definition: Benefits Management