MSP For Dummies

Chapter 24

Ten Great Ways to Manage Benefits

In This Chapter

Linking benefits and stakeholders

Ensuring benefits ownership

Measuring the right aspects

Benefits management is my favourite part of programme management for the following reasons:

• It's the only new idea I've come across in change delivery for a very long time.
• It helps me stay engaged with my stakeholders.
• It allows me to demonstrate to my sponsors how I've helped the business.

That's enough good reasons to be going on with I think.

Beware, however, of benefits management being hijacked by:

• Specialists who want to turn it into an arcane art form and build an empire.
• Finance people who want all benefits to be converted into monetary values to allow them to compare like with like.

But enough of the negatives; in this chapter I give you ten positive ways to manage your programme benefits effectively.

Doing it in Public

The fact is that you do some things in public and other in private (steady!). Modelling benefits is something to do in public (phew!).

Understand who your stakeholders are before you send out the agenda ...