Regarding customer satisfaction in digital transformation programs, project management maturity influences project management success, but not necessarily project investment success. So, when applying project management practices alone to transformative change results may be frustrating.
Program Management is all about delivering measurable benefits – both financial and non-financial. It builds and integrates organizational capabilities into everyday operations, ensuring desired outcomes are achieved and benefits realized. It also addresses any potential disbenefits, managing them alongside positive outcomes. With its cross-functional and time-sensitive approach, Program Management drives the phased realization of measurable benefits.
How do we ensure that the intended benefits of our organizational initiatives are identified, planned for, and ultimately realized?
Value stories by making success measurable
The service area of Benefit Realization Management (BRM) strategically ensures organizations identify, plan, and achieve intended benefits from their projects or initiatives through systematic definition, measurement, and tracking of expected benefits.
The following steps should be considered within the transformation setup in an end2end business value approach:
Benefit Identification: Define the specific gains expected from a project in line with strategic goals.
Benefit Planning: Develop a plan to achieve identified benefits, including setting metrics, targets, timelines, and resource allocation.
Benefit Realization: Execute the plan, monitoring progress, addressing issues, and ensuring intended benefits are achieved.
Benefit Review and Evaluation: Assess actual outcomes against targets post-implementation, identifying areas for improvement and lessons learned.
Know where your business customers want to get better
Business value of IT hinges on stakeholder perception, not IT metrics. Effective communication yields 60% higher funding. CIOs must translate technical performance into business outcomes aligned with stakeholders' top objectives.
Value mapping is generally carried out based on the following three value-added areas, each of which should already include the respective sustainability goals:
Business Growth:
Strong emphasis on top-line elements like revenue growth, sales success, market share development and customer retention.
Operational Excellence:
Primarily contains bottom-line elements like cost efficiency, gross margin, process optimization and technology integration.
Regulatory Compliance:
Predominantly focuses on aspects of risk/compliance management and reporting as well as business continuity.
In certain business domains, a fourth objective may receive emphasis, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, or Customer Service enhancements. Managers should assess the distinctiveness of this potential fourth priority and determine whether digital activities can directly impact its outcomes.
Therefore, incorporating Benefit Realization Management (BRM) into value-based program management entails expanding the initiation phase by clearly outlining both qualitative and quantitative benefits. This ensures effective project management and, consequently, the success of the entire transformation program.
Impulse To Go
To ascertain the benefits to be attained and assessed, a thorough case-by-case evaluation is imperative. Nonetheless, when embarking on the initial stages, it is essential to bear in mind the significance of considering the three metric categories to effectively complete the benefit assessment process.
Strategic metrics like Financial (e.g. ROI), Time (e.g. time-to-market), Team (e.g. talents retention rate) and Coverage metrics (e.g. market share).
Product/Service metrics like Cost/Benefit ratio, Customer Acquisistion Costs or Customer Churn Rate.
Process metrics like Productivity Rate, Operational Efficiency, classic SLAs or Errors/Events per month/quarter/year.
Embracing the business value of Digital Transformation involves continuously monitoring the benefits through an agile feedback loop spanning from strategy to operations and back again. This is what makes the transformation journey sustainably successful.
* Gartner Group, CIO Agenda, 2023
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