The Project Book

CHAPTER 45 WHY THIS? WHY NOW?

Here’s the thing about the benefits of your projects: if your senior managers care — and I mean really care — about them, then their realisation won’t be an issue. You deliver projects, and they have actions in place to get the benefits. Easy. As project leader, you get to see the fruits of your team’s labours and the stakeholders get to reap the rewards. Everyone is happy.

I’ve worked for and with organisations where this has been the case. Not getting the benefits from projects just isn’t a thing. They’re in business plans and people’s performance objectives and they’re taken seriously. If the benefits are compromised, then the project is stopped or just never started.

From day one, as soon as the benefits are declared in business cases, senior managers need to be on the hook for them. If they declared cost savings, then these should be immediately deducted from the following year’s budgets. If they’re undertaken to mitigate risk, then at the conclusion of the project, the risk is no longer something you have to worry about.

At one organisation where I headed up the project division, we worked with the CFO to add ‘budget line to be reduced’ to the business case to stop senior managers erroneously declaring cost savings to make business cases look financially better. Within three months we’d changed the behaviour.

Unfortunately, for most organisations the realisation of benefits is still seen as unachievable.

Indeed, a KPMG survey of over 100 organisations ...