Program Management

CHAPTER 12Sustaining Benefits

This chapter is focused on sustaining change outcomes and the role of the program manager in creating the change lifecycle resilience. Benefits realization lifecycle is dependent on the nature of the program, and thus the anticipated journey to realize these benefits could vary. Having a clear ownership for sustaining benefits and the right supporting plan is a must for this to happen. Multiple stakeholders have to come together and align on their roles for what will be required for sustaining benefits and agreeing on what that would look like.

Key Learnings

• Understand the lifecycle view of identifying, executing, and sustaining benefits.
• Reflect on examples for creating the resiliency needed for managing the programs benefits.
• Learn how to create the environment, the ownership, and the trust for sustaining benefits.
• Explore the HBR study on reasons how strategy execution falters.
• Develop an appreciation for how a global consultancy’ secret sauce for cascading ownership could work for you and your organization.

12.1 BENEFITS ACROSS THE LIFECYCLE¹

12.1.1 Introduction

Organizations have been struggling with the creation of a portfolio of projects within a program that would provide sustainable business value. All too often, companies would add all project requests to the program queue for delivery without proper evaluation and with little regard if the new projects were aligned with program business objectives or provided benefits and ...