Project Benefit Realisation and Project Management. Raymond C. Young

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1 Introduction

      The Board, Governance and Projects

      A corporate board’s role is to ‘ensure management is focused on above‐average returns while taking account of risk’ [1, 2]. At a minimum, in our post‐COVID world, the board needs to ensure the survival of an organisation. For most organisations, business‐as‐usual is not an option because the environment has changed so much. Projects have always been important but now they are even more so because projects are the vehicle to take us from where we are now to where we need to be to survive and thrive. Project failure is not an option and projects are more of a boardroom issue than they ever were.

      However, at the board and senior management level, we have tended to think of projects as someone else’s problem. Boards willingly take oversight of a company’s strategy but they seldom follow through on the insight that strategy [3] is implemented through projects. When we pause, reflect, and examine the success rates of strategy and projects, all the evidence suggests there is a very large strategy to performance gap [4]. Fewer than 10% of strategies are fully implemented [5], most large projects fail to live up to expectations [6] and between half to two‐thirds of projects either fail outright or deliver no discernible benefits [7]. There is a major deficiency in practice. Projects are troublesome with high capital costs, long time frames, and difficulties in delivery. Apart from the funding decision, most of us would prefer not to have to deal with projects at all. However, the world has changed and now, unless projects succeed, there may be no business at all. Boards and their advisors need to discuss projects in terms of the strategic benefits to be realised and go beyond the traditional focus on time and cost.

Project results appear to be no better in the public sector where hundreds of billions of dollars are invested annually in projects that contribute little to policy goals [8, 9]. If this pattern were to continue into the post‐COVID‐world: huge sums of money will be wasted, more people will die, and the economy may take decades longer than necessary to recover. At the senior management level, we need to go beyond issues of probity and simply doing it right. We need to learn to focus on the more important issue of realising strategic benefits in the right projects.

      This book has been written to address the needs of the board and senior management. It deals with projects, but it is not a project management book. Instead, it focuses on implementing strategy, policy, and creating value through projects.

      This book has been written because boards and top managers need better guidance. There is a paradox in project management: Project management is a mature discipline but following the standard guidelines does not automatically lead to success [10, 11]. There is widespread confusion [12] between project management success (on‐time on‐budget) and project success (realisation of business benefits) and most project management books incorrectly imply that one will lead to another. The guidelines that exist do not explicitly acknowledge that it is more important to realise strategic benefits than to simply come in on‐time and on‐budget. This notion is particularly important in the world of the new normal where it will be even less important to focus on time and budget criteria of projects and focus on achieving strategic goals of organisations. A classic example occurred during СКАЧАТЬ