Traditionally, projects are organized to create specified deliverables and success is measured when the project is delivered. But why not drive projects by benefits instead? Why not include the important change-making period after project delivery to better ensure that the project delivers real benefits for users and stakeholders? Chief Consultant Kaare Pedersen explains how we should look at the relationship between delivery and benefits differently.
Success - but not really a success
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for a project to end and all success criteria for deliverables are met - and yet the project never really becomes the success it was expected to be. An IT system is purchased and put into operation, a building is constructed or an organizational change is launched. On paper, everything looks great, and by the time it's delivered, all success criteria can be checked off. However, even after six months or even years, the project is still not a complete success. What went and is going wrong with such delivery-driven projects?
So what do we do?
Chief Consultant Kaare Pedersen has been advising and facilitating project organizations to work better for decades, and he recommends that we work less delivery-driven and more profit-driven.
"A benefits-driven project is always rooted in the effects that will come out of the project. We are concerned with what changes will happen and what positive improvements the project will bring about, for ourselves and for the citizens," Kaare recommends.
Projects for living people
In other words: More focus on effects and benefits, and then you can be more flexible about the products that the project will deliver. After all, these are real, living people who will use the project's products at some point, either as managers and employees or as citizens and businesses in a municipality. Therefore, it is important to involve the end users and stakeholders in the project: Their professional recommendations, wishes, needs and experiences, their culture, behavioral patterns and benchmarks are crucial.
3 prerequisites for success with profit-driven projects
The ideal for all projects, regardless of form, is the same: to deliver real value for users and stakeholders. So what is it that profit-driven projects can do to deliver on this ideal? Kaare Pedersen points to three selected approaches that contribute to success.
- User involvement sharpens the focus: Bring employees and end users into the heart of the project and listen to what they define as the project's success criteria. What provides value to them? This "bottom-up" perspective must be included in the project as an indispensable contribution to the project's "top-down" strategic anchoring.
- Culture and practices contribute to success: A project that simply leaves its deliverables on the doorstep, so to speak, has a very hard time contributing to employee and stakeholder buy-in. Culture and change-making practices are needed. How can employees translate the project's intentions into results for stakeholders in the post-project period and contribute to change going forward? This needs to be built into the project from the start.
- Good evaluation documents and anchors success: In profit-driven projects, you work with qualitative success criteria that go beyond what you would traditionally measure in minutes, centimetres, kilos, kroner and euros. The question then becomes how the profit-driven project agrees to set and then measure the qualitative success criteria. You need to agree on how the project organization at the end of the project will be replaced by a benefits organization that measures the benefits in the following 6-12 months.
The article is published on KL's website. You can find it here.
