Home » Blog » What’s Driving Benefits Realization?

What’s Driving Benefits Realization?

Today’s businesses are moving away from a focus on measuring project results and towards a focus on business benefits.  Senior managers want to know how investments align with business metrics and will impact the business.  

There’s a lot of discussion about organizations instituting benefits realization tools to ensure investments deliver real business value.  

As organizations begin to build a benefits realization framework, they need to be aware of the elements that will influence its success.

  1. Investments Driven by Business Objectives:  An organization with an investment strategy driven by objectives will first look at business perspective and goals then shop for investments which will meet those objectives.
  2. Relevant Business Case:  The business case helps ensure the right investments are funded.  A thorough and accurate business case will address the dependency of outcomes on cost or revenue based drivers.
  3. The Benefits Realization Process and Governance:  Rather than focusing on an isolated project, start thinking in terms of portfolios, the full project management lifecycle and accountability for benefits realization.
  4. Reliable Metrics:  Know what’s going on throughout the project, asset or product lifecycle and be in control of those investments.
  5. Technology Capable of Digitalizing Aspects of Benefits Realization:  Improving processes and motivation isn’t enough to improve benefits realization.  Powerful software solutions are needed to aggregate metrics at program and portfolio levels, deliver the business case and enable process and governance.

Knowing what will help benefits realization succeed, businesses can move forward with an audit of their existing system to see where improvements should be made.  A change will likely be required to move from a system which has long said it is measuring project success to one which looks at the bigger picture, the portfolio view, and works to ensure projects and investments deliver true business value.

Want to know more about Benefits Realization?  Read UMT360 CEO Mike Gruia’s white paper, The Benefits Realization Crisis, for a look at how organizations should get started.  Click here to download.

Ben Chamberlain

Ben Chamberlain is the Chief Product Officer and is responsible for the strategic direction and worldwide go-to-market activities for UMT360’s Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) software solutions. He is an accomplished enterprise software executive with more than a decade of experience of building innovative SPM solutions that have helped global 2000 companies drive business transformation and increase their business agility. Ben joined UMT in 2002 and was responsible for the in-market success of UMT Portfolio Manager which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Ben has a degree in Business and Sports Science from Surrey University (UK).