When summarising a project and whether it should it's very easy to get mixed up about what information is being presented. It's easy to mix up ideas abut the projects aims, methods, benefits, requirements, and intentions. I like to use a really simple model when describing the one-slide view of a project for business.
It consists of:
Deliver ables: What the project will actually deliver, e.g. a new work flow system.
Objectives: What is the hoped for outcomes of theses, e.g. increased operator efficiency, lowered waiting times for customers.
Benefits: How delivering these benefits will actually the organisations, e.g. Reduced Costs, increased customer satisfaction, compliance with legislation.
These can then be easily linked together. Deliverables contribute to one or more objectives, and objectives deliver to one or more benefits.
You can then quantify how much each deliverable will cost, and how much each objective delivers to each benefit. This feeds straight into your cost/benefit analysis, or more realistically provides a simple way of presenting it that transparently links it back to project activities and benefits.
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While Deliverables is certainly a clear stand out, it seems that objectives and benefits are more interlinked, dependant and, strangely, interchangable.
ReplyDeletefor example, Reduced costs can be an objective as well as a Benefit. How do you delineate between the two?
Objectives are things that are internal to your project - benefits are things that are external and relate to the company.
ReplyDeleteI think of them as what the business sponsor cares about, vs. what his manager cares above.
The business sponsor may care aboutincreasing number of forms processed per person per day, but his manager is just going to see that as another line-item in reducing costs.
Really for commercial businesses benefits are all some flavour of increase profits or reduce costs - even if they go through a fluffy step like "Increased customer satisfaction" (Less churn) or "Improve Employee Moralte" (Lower HR & Training costs).
For a govt department it's easy. They generally have defined KPIs and Missions that are your benefits by default.