Project Benefit Realisation and Project Management. Raymond C. Young

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СКАЧАТЬ government spent billions of dollars on school buildings to keep the economy moving. Schools got a new hall whether they needed one or not and the public dialogue was all about time and cost. The expenditure helped the economy, but no one thought to question whether equally important strategic educational goals such as literacy and numeracy had improved because of the projects. We risk repeating the same mistake as we commission projects to overcome the downturn in the economy caused by COVID‐19.

      Projects rarely succeed in realising their expected benefits without the top management support [13, 14] and this is even more the case in the post‐pandemic world. Project management books provide little to no guidance for the senior management and, as a result, top managers are often not sure how to govern their projects to succeed. This insight informed the development of an international standard ISO38500 [15] and is based on HB280 [16]: an Australian Handbook for boards and their senior managers on how to govern ICT projects to succeed. HB280 is a research report distilling the experience of senior managers to identify what they did right and what they did wrong in governing their projects to succeed (or fail). In the words of one senior manager, ‘These big projects are a little like marriage, you don’t do them often enough to get practiced at it [and it is valuable to debrief to identify what you did to cause them to succeed]’.

HB280 presented five cases and distilled the lessons learned into six key questions that boards and their delegates should be asking when governing projects. These six questions were trademarked as 6Q Governance™ to make them more memorable. The 6Q Governance Framework has been tested with an international dataset to prove it works with all types of projects [17]. We see an adaptation of this framework as particularly well suited for the current transition into the new normal where projects need to be constantly revisited and interrogated by their clients and sponsors rather than have their requirements frozen in time and driven to completion with the least disruption. This handbook will show boards and their senior managers how to apply the 6Q Governance Framework by asking just six key questions at different stages in a project lifecycle. This is the first handbook to present projects in the context of the needs of the top manager and is written for board members, their ‘accidental’ project sponsors, the business project manager, and their project advisors.

      A Diagnostic Toolbox for Project Executives

      Our aim in this handbook is to set forward the basic diagnostic toolbox that will help executives understand the strategic health of their project portfolio and to know whether they are on track to realise the benefits that they were originally set out to achieve. We are offering the equivalent of a doctor’s stethoscope and a diagnostic map: six places to check to determine the health of your project. As in any medical check‐up, the general condition will depend on how several forces interact with each other in a systemic way. If a doctor requests a blood test for example, what we will get is a few measurements with values within certain ranges that are deemed as normal for any given parameter. If the blood counts are all within the expected ranges, no action is to be taken. If, however, a certain value is found to be outside the ‘normal’ range, then action needs to be taken to explore the nature of the ‘disease’.

Our method establishes dialogue and questioning as the main mode of engagement to achieve alignment between projects, strategy, and policy and, thus, undertake a project health check. The diagnostics will allow us to probe into different aspects of the project in order to guide reflection on the different options for the project business case and if and how it is going to fulfil its objectives. These questions are the backbone of our thinking in this book and they are the equivalent of the diagnostic map shown in Figure 1.1. Armed with the knowledge of where to look and listen, you are the stethoscope to bring your projects into strategic conversations.

      We next introduce a toolbox grouped by six questions that you can use to make sense of any given number of projects in their organisation and then govern at the right time. These six questions were derived by rigorously looking at both successful and unsuccessful projects and asking what could have been done to improve the business outcome. The 6Q Governance business canvas is given below and each of its areas will be elaborated in more detail in Chapter 2 of this book.

Figure 1.1 6Q Governance (TM) as a business canvas.

The rest of the handbook is organised in the following way:

       Key concepts

       Chapter 2: The 6Q Governance questions

       Chapter 3: Tools and techniques

       Chapter 4: Further insights

       Appendices: Detailed case studies – for practice

Key Concepts

      Project Management Success vs. Project Success

      Before we launch into the six Questions, there is an important concept to establish: what is success in the context of the new normal? A lot has been written about project success in terms of time and cost, so much so that for most people, this is their only understanding of success. It is a blind spot for most practitioners. As long as the project delivery team can argue that they delivered what was agreed in the project brief and as long as they can do it within the constraints of time and budget, they will be seen as successful. Of course, there are many nuances to this argument by adding additional dimensions such as innovation, stakeholder management, leadership, entrepreneurship, and others but, ultimately, they all boil down to whether the project was on‐time and on‐budget.

This is the idea of project success that we are criticising in this book. We are not saying that projects should be seen as if they are unbounded by earthly constraints such as time and budget. But we are saying that a more strategic view of project success is necessary to come up with a meaningful execution strategy. For example, the question of whether stopping a failing project early should be considered a failure or success is never asked in the traditional execution sense. It would invariably be considered a failed project. In the same vein, a project that delivered nothing but a white elephant – an asset that is expensive to maintain but of very little or no use at all – would be considered a success as long as its deliverable remotely resembles what was promised in the brief when it was put together even if the world may have changed since then – and it will have changed.

      So, how can we then change the emphasis to project success rather than project management success? This is the main riddle we will try to address with this handbook. Having been involved with projects and their management in various shapes and forms collectively for several decades, the main problem we’ve seen is one of failing to achieve alignment between policy, strategy, operations (outcome thinking), and project delivery (output thinking).

      Currently, projects are not measured on how they are aligned with the ever‐evolving strategy and operational requirements of their respective organisations, but on how they aligned with their own plans suggested at the outset. Therefore, the front‐end planning ends up being a proxy for measuring project success, regardless of whether the project plans made sense in the first place. Then, as the project unfolds, project plans are often put forward with an entirely different mindset and agenda than what is described in the business case. Indeed, the underlying rationale of the project brief is to provide an early outline and a СКАЧАТЬ