MSP Sound bites are brief articles from the lead author of MSP07, Rod Sowden, where he looks at issues facing organisations using MSP and endeavour to clarify, emphasis or challenge the way the framework is deployed.

A recent discussion with one of our major clients, who sets best practice for their organisation  resulted in the question, “How should we recommend our  programmes categorise their  benefits?”

Benefits Management is continually evolving and the main point of reference for many people is the MSP manual . This was a simple enough question in itself but the Managing Successful Programmes manual provides us with a number of options. There are plenty of other good references around that have developed the ideas further,  the HM Treasury Green Book and  Steve Jenner’s  book ‘Realising Benefits from Government ICT investment – a fool’s errand?’ to name but two.

There are many good ideas in the Managing Successful Programmes “Benefits Realisation Management” chapter that get lost in the noise and detail of the careful and literal interpretation taught to delegates preparing for the APM Group examinations.  This chapter was written in a way that required practitioners to interpret and apply the concepts rather than use them literally.

In the MSP™ manual the options for answering the question on how to use categories includes:

Value Types: which the manual states are Tangible or Intangible and are then further broken down as cashable and non cashable, with a further ranking on how likely they are.

Tangible infers they are directly measurable and Intangible infers that they are not measurable or there are some sort of proxy measures.

Cashable  is an actual saving whereas Non cashable is an efficiency that is released to do something else. Many organisations weren’t making the distinction and as such were expecting a cash saving which never materialised.

Benefits can also be categorised as either Definite, Expected and Anticipated, these aren’t not really Value Types they are more a reflection of confidence.

Impact:  which are either “key operational” or “strategic” and is a way of showing where the benefit will appear and seeking to have a balanced portfolio of benefits.

Types:  these are either Intermediate or End benefits. They reflect when and how the benefit will be achieved. in the short term or as an element of bigger or longer term benefit.

So as a way forward, here is our suggestion on how to categorise your benefits into logical groupings. When you stand back and look at benefits, many of the risk management tools and techniques are quite similar. So we are suggesting that we use some of the more mature vocabulary from the world of risk to bring some consistency to the benefits world as well. 

Category:   Economic, effective or efficient

This doesn’t have an equivalent in the OGC Management of Risk approach, but we can draw from other parts of public sector best practice. The HM Treasury Green Book identifies the 3 E’s  and over the last couple of years we have worked with many organisations and still have not found a benefit which doesn’t fit one of these categories.

A brief description for each is:

• Economic is a financial improvement, either a saving or maybe increased income.
• Effective is doing things better or to a higher standard.
• Efficient is doing more for the same or the same with less.

These are also the starting points for the search for benefits. It may well be that a benefits model is developed to illustrate each category, this is in turn will highlight the dependencies between the outputs and outcomes.

Perspective:  Strategic, and operational.

The OGC Management of Risk manual uses Perspectives to describe where the affects will be felt, so we can use these in benefits as well.

Strategic will be longer term or have a longer lead time for achievement or it may also be that they are non cashable, benefits in the Effective category may well also be Strategic.  Tactical benefits would appear in the shorter term and may contribute to the aggregating value of a strategic benefit, they may also tend to be in the Efficiency category.

Impact: Cashable or Non Cashable

It may be that the value of the benefit is higher than the actual cashable saving, or in fact none of the value of the benefit is cashable. This needs to be clearly understood. It is good practice to show both the value of the benefit and the cashable saving separately to avoid any misunderstanding.

Likelihood: High, Medium or Low

This will provide the level of certainty associated with the achievement of the benefit, this contributes to understanding the overall level of risk for the programme.  The best way to use this classification is to associate a numeric value with the level of confidence and use this to factor the amount of the benefit that is achievable.  

Numeric levels could be applied to individual benefits as follows:

• High = 90% of the value is accounted for
• Medium = 60% of the value is accounted for
• Low = 30% of the value is accounted for

We have only used three levels of confidence; you could use 5 or 10 levels if you require more granularity. It is amazing how many business cases lose their lustre when the confidence level is applied. It also focuses the organisation on where the big wins are and also any windows of opportunity.

There is obviously a lot more information about individual benefits that should be stored in the Benefits Profile, but using these categories you can produce a useful Benefits Register for your programme board to monitor progress, ideally supported by a benefits map which shows how the benefits fit together.  So your Benefits Register could look a little like this?

There are additional headings that would want to include even in a Benefits Register that aren’t in this one, e.g.  Ownership, timescale and measurement  are critical heading that should included. .

We could take another leaf from the book of risk by using proximity to support the Benefits Realisation Plan.  This can help us to spot term opportunities or those that are spotted as the programme progresses, including Quick Wins – which is a well established phrase passed down over the years but  has dropped off the radar in recently.

In conclusion there are plenty of good ideas around in the benefits management arena, hopefully these will prove useful in helping your organisation bring some order to the proceedings.  This kind of categorisation information should be defined in your programme Benefits Management Strategy to ensure that you have a consistent framework across your programme and everyone is clear what standards you are working to. If you have a Portfolio Office, then there should be organisational standards that you should adopt.

This is an article from the Aspire Europe December newsletter

“How come we are finding it so difficult to get our projects to take notice of lessons learned from previous projects” Ian, Ministry of Defence. London.

Well Ian, you have hit on a very interesting problem here. Asking people to use the lessons from other projects to make their lives easier, save time, money and hassle seems such an obvious thing to do and yet as we work with our clients we see it more and more and evidence of learning from experience in our P3M3 (OGC Portfolio, Programme, Project Management Maturity Model) reviews is meagre indeed.

Here are a few reasons why this happens, some hints on how to deal with it and interesting insight into the problem as provided by P3M3 maturity levels.

Individuals who take on delivery of a project are often “unconsciously incompetent”, i.e they don’t know what they don’t know and as such don’t see the reason for looking for problems from other projects. This is a compounded by Project Sponsor, the less experience they have of project delivery the less likely they are to be inquisitive about what others have learned. If the business case approval process had something in it that used evidence from other implementations to justify the investment it would help

a.       Project management methods (PRINCE2 being a good example) tend to have lessons learned listed as an activity somewhere near the end of the lifecycle or at key delivery points. If you were to inject a “Research previous projects” as an early step in the project delivery process then we might active investigation. The Aspire Europe Ltd Align Toolbox, which has a programme and project management lifecycle has this activity very early in the lifecycle.

b.      Not invented here is another problem people want to be creative.  Some organisations and teams have a rather inflated view of their own capability in our experience and assume they won’t make the same mistakes, but of course most of the failings were entirely predictable but once it starts to go wrong the bunker mentality kicks in.  There is also seems to be  an element of being seen as weak if you look to speak to other organisations or it may be that people are just too shy to go and find people who have got the t-shirt from a similar roll out – or it’s easier to bring in consultants who have the t-shirts !

c.       Learning from Experience is a leadership tool and should be seen as strength rather than weakness. MSP highlights this as a basic principle for success. We use the principles as a key element for our briefings of sponsors and SRO’s to ensure they are aware of it, but again there is a reluctance to consult. It may of course be that people are concerned at what they might discover about the likely success of their project if they do consult.

d.      Finally we promised some insight from P3M3 which we believe hits the nail on the head. Knowledge Management is a characteristic of organisational Maturity Level 4. This is about as high as most organisations can hope to go in the 5 level model

Using corporate knowledge banks needs easy access to relevant information and for the individuals in the organisation to have the behavioural characteristics required to search out and find relevant advice.  Most of the work done on P3M3 maturity assessments has shown that at this time, most organisations are operating at Maturity Level 2, which is characterised by inconsistency of approach but with hotspots of good practice.

At Level 2 some projects would be producing lessons learned reports but might not have a knowledge bank into which it can be easily shared or accessed and many of the individuals will not have the level of competence to understand the need to hunt out the information. So there, in a nutshell, is why organisations struggle with utilising the lessons learned information that is available within it.

We are excited to announce that we have been invited to present to the House of Commons to support our tender to provide executive training and support to their leaders in the programme and project management arena.�

We are really pleased to advise that Alison has joined us and will be the first person people call Aspire will speak to.

She will be looking after all our training customers and making sure our courses are delivered smoothly, effectively and with a sense of humour.

Great to have you with us Alison 

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We are really pleased to announce that Kent County Council have appointed Aspire Europe Ltd to their framework of suppliers for the provision of Programme and Project Management training and consultancy.

The framework has been designed to serve all the councils in the region. We are already the preferred supplier to South East Enterprise Development Agency and we are looking forward to extending our relationship into the local authorities of the region

Bristol CC have appointed Aspire Europe Ltd to deliver a range of training requirements for staff at all levels to support the deployment of Portfolio Management across the council.

As our local council - we are really really pleased to have been chosen. 

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We had some great comments from delegates who appreciated the quality and pace of MSP 4 day course, delivered in Bath in October.

I honestly found MSP to be of immediate business value. I am doing some work on what is a relatively complex programme and can see with confidence the various projects, and have developed the programme organisation with the concept of business transformation in mind. It has really helped be to step in to a complex business situation with confidence and develop a clear picture - Free lance consultant in Private Health Sector

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For more information and to book a place please contact enquiries@aspireeurope.com

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