FAQ4

Benefits Assurance is essentially a tool for project control. Standard project management theory and practice tends to emphasise the activity of a project at the expense of its purpose. Benefits Assurance provides a counter-balance by providing the means to maintain a focus on the goal of benefits realisation throughout the project. Many unsuccessful programmes have ‘failed’ because they have lost sight of their overall purpose. The aim of Benefits Assurance is to provide a framework and tool-kit to prevent that happening.

Benefits Assurance requires that the purpose of the project is clearly defined in terms of the organisational outcomes and stakeholder benefits that must be achieved if it is to be said that the project has been successful. It then provides the means to:

specify comprehensively the cause and effect chain that will achieve the desired organisational outcomes and stakeholder benefits,

create a plan that will ensure that all the necessary actions to achieve the desired organisational outcomes and stakeholder benefits are carried out,

define and execute a measurement plan that will monitor progress towards achievement of the project’s purpose,

evaluate the benefits actually realised by the programme in order to:

account to the ‘owners’ of the investment in value-for-money terms.

review actual vs. anticipated benefits realisation as a basis for organisational learning.

Benefits Assurance is not a methodology in its own right but an end-to-end control stream within the whole project lifecycle, as represented by the e-change Framework. The activities listed above can be clearly discerned within the phases and stages of the e-change Framework.