What is Benefits Realisation?

An investment is only successful if the intended benefits are realised. 

Benefits realisation supports key choices and actions to achieve this success.

Investments are made for many reasons but ultimately they are expected to result in the realisation of business benefits. There is a history of poor selection, delivery and realisation of benefits from investments. Effective benefits realisation approaches have been in use since the mid 1990’s, but, until Wovex, no tools have been developed to fully enable these approaches.

Benefits realisation can be used to describe part of the approach or all. Benefits realisation when used for the whole approach (also called benefits realisation management - BRM) helps you to create and implement a benefits strategy, benefits plan, benefits tracking and realisation. It is the explicit planning, delivery and management of whole life benefits from an investment.

Wovex & Benefits Realisation

Wovex is a solution for benefits realisation that enables advanced benefits realisation and more. Wovex has been designed by benefits management practitioners to be easy to use, save time and give superior results.

Wovex helps you to qualify and prioritise benefits, establish measurements and create plans to realise them in novel ways. Wovex will support the optimising of plans to deliver the highest priority benefits for the resources available. Then help to monitor, review and manage the benefits realisation and to keep investments on-track. Wovex is very visual to help engage stakeholders. Wovex can also easily integrate into on-going operations.

Wovex has been designed to help people to be accountable for benefits realisation, reduce confusion and to save time and cost.
Ultimately it helps us to realise greater business benefits from the right investments.

So benefits realisation is an approach that helps realise greater benefits, faster, at a low cost and risk for your projects and programmes.
You can deliver greater returns from change and investment decisions with Wovex helping you.

Definitions

Benefits realisation can be used in situations such as procurement, projects, programmes, portfolios and in continuing business operations.

Benefits are changes identified as important by stakeholders and can be strategic or non-strategic.

A Benefit is a measurable positive impact of change. A dis-benefit is a measurable negative impact of change. Successful benefits realisation requires accountable people, relevant measures and proactive management. A benefits strategy, benefits framework, process as well as benefits plan and benefits register all help realise greater benefits.

A Process

A generic project benefits realisation process is to:

• Identify the investment objectives and Benefits
• Define benefit measures for each Benefit
• Collect current benefit measure data to have a quantitative basis for decision making
• Agree on a tailored benefits realisation approach for this investment
• Plan the new or changed capabilities necessary to realise the benefits
• Plan the investments needed to make the changes necessary to create or change the capabilities
• Optimise the plan to reduce waste and have acceptable levels of resource, risk, cost, quality and time
• Implement the plan with needed processes, roles, data and tooling to support project benefits management
• Review the impact of the plan implementation on the Benefit Measures and use insights to improve
• On completion of the plan, ensure BRM continues to sustain the capabilities and realisation of benefits.

A technique used in ‘identify the investment objectives and Benefits’ is the creation of a pictorial view of the Benefits of interest on a Benefit map (also called a SuccesMap, value Map, results chain, benefits dependency network or Outcome map).

This technique supports agreement of the Benefits sought as it shows the Benefits and relationships between them on a single page. They can be agreed upon and communicated clearly as a result.

Data can then be captured either separately or within a suitable modelling tool for each Benefit that will include the benefit measures used for each, ownership and accountability information and information to support benefits realisation. These are traditionally called the benefits plan and benefits register.

Wovex fully supports this end-to-end process within a single solution.