Customer Science

Solution

Value Management Consulting

Benefits planning is popular; benefits realisation rarely survives the go-live. We stay through the whole investment lifecycle, so the value a business case promised is measured, reported and evaluated rather than assumed.

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A facilitator drawing a benefits map on a whiteboard for four seated participants.

Solution benefits

What value management changes

Improved business value

Value and objective-based thinking maps measurable, linked value, so you can see what a change actually does and keep projects grounded in creating lasting value.

Business objective impact

The work stays pointed at your business objectives and brand, so it moves the organisation's vision and targets.

Return

A rapid return on your investment in our services. We lower costs, target spend and release staffing capacity.

Sustainable improvements

Templates, tools, implementation services, people and coaching, handed over so the benefit stays after we go.

Ways to start

Where most engagements begin

Maturity Assessment

One to two weeks of workshops and interviews that identify your strengths and where to improve.

Our services

Strategy on a Page

Leadership teams are usually willing to look two or five years ahead and to accept that change is needed. Where they struggle is linking the two: explaining how change, and business as usual, will actually get the organisation to its goals.

You can see it when there is no shared view of what success means beyond the financials, when there is no rigorous prioritisation so work starts on the many irrelevant things rather than the important few, when nobody can express how an activity contributes value, and when managers and staff cannot see the part they play.

We build one page: an "Our Business in 202X" strategy linking vision, mission and goals to the outcomes they are meant to produce. One picture that communicates, prioritises and defines success.

Benefits Realisation

Benefits realisation is a discipline that rarely succeeds. The enthusiasm goes into the planning, and too little attention goes into recording and reporting the measures of success during and after delivery.

Our approach covers the full investment lifecycle, including the evaluation that is usually skipped, and follows the NSW Government Benefits Realisation Management Framework and its four phases:

  • Understand - clarifying how the benefits will arise from change
  • Plan - developing benefits plans for key outcomes, with metrics and accountabilities defined
  • Realise and report - measuring and analysing outcomes to actively support delivery
  • Evaluate - drawing learnings from the program to inform later decisions and priorities

Portfolio Management

Choosing the most valuable digitally enabled projects out of an investment portfolio is how you prevent value leaking away. Our method moves an organisation past managing a portfolio for cost and resourcing alone, towards a credible and consistent view of what relative value means here.

We score value across three parameters - strategic alignment, business contribution, and risk and readiness - and keep adjusting the portfolio as things change, so the decisions stay transparent.

Value Governance

Value management only bites when a governance framework sits behind it. We help establish and maintain the decision-making and monitoring structures, processes and information that govern the investment portfolio, so value management principles hold across the whole lifecycle of a transformation.

One example is establishing and sustaining a Value Management Office, whose job is to actively manage the realisation of value across the portfolio.

Outcomes Mapping

An Outcomes Map shows how a set of initiatives contributes to a set of outcomes. Agreed by a group, it represents their shared understanding of a situation at a point in time, built from views, facts and expectations. That understanding changes as the program changes or as people understand their situation better, and the map is adjusted as results come in.

Developing one is more an art than a science. It has none of the precision of a mathematical model, but contribution and outcomes are notions business people grasp immediately.

Its real job is dispelling "Miracle Thinking" about how the benefits will appear. It gives a simple visual picture of how investing in technology and business change might produce the value stakeholders expect, and building it is often what gets everyone onto the same page about scope, purpose and the key assumptions to manage. One page, for the why and the what.

Proud to be servicing our clients

  • The Treasury
  • Australian Taxation Office
  • Maridulu Budyari Gumal
  • UNSW Sydney
  • ACCC
  • eHealth NSW

Insights

Related insights

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Your team

Your solution leaders

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Resources

The Information Paradox

The book that sits behind this practice. It deals with how hard organisations find it to get real business value out of IT investment - the paradox being the gap between how much is spent on IT and how unclear the return usually is. It sets out the Benefits Realisation Approach, argues for focusing on the benefits rather than the delivery, and works through the industrial-age management habits that get in the way.

Download a PDF copy of The Information Paradox or chat with the book.

The cover of the book The Information Paradox.

Websites

Where this thinking comes from

Frameworks and standards

New South Wales

People

Tell us what your last big investment was meant to deliver, and we will tell you how to find out whether it did.

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