Friends with benefits

Why it is important for project and programme managers to translate benefits management into their organisations.

Most commonly, we think of translation as taking place between different languages, but in management theory, the term has a wider meaning in relation to the specialist concepts and vocabularies that we use in our activities. 

Key to the process of translation are actors, the people who make things happen, and objects, the different types of documentation that the actors produce, disseminate and use, such as guidance from professional associations. 

Project management is full of interconnected management ideas at different levels (project, programme and portfolio) and covering different themes (value, benefits, costs, risks and quality). 

In many organisations, they are interwoven with other management ideas, popular examples being agile, lean and big data. Large organisations often develop their own frameworks, consciously drawing on different management ideas. An example is GlaxoSmithKline’s accelerating delivery and performance approach (see Project, December 2014, page 30), which draws on organisational development, lean sigma and project management principles. 

Benefits management

Benefits management emerged as a distinctive management idea about 25 years ago but, despite evidence that a focus on benefits improves the success rate of projects and programmes, it seems to have had a limited impact so far. 

There are many reasons why this might be the case, ranging from the multiple meanings of the term ‘benefits’ to discomfort among senior decision-makers at the increased accountability, transparency and formality that benefits management brings to the evaluation of investment decisions. 

There is very little evidence as to why benefits management is adopted by some organisations, but fails to make headway elsewhere. Furthermore, some that have embedded it into their management practices do not call it ‘benefits management’. Translation would address such questions directly.

Much of the recent research on benefits management has been concerned with the incidence of its practices. However, this research is susceptible to different interpretations as to what is involved in undertaking a particular benefits management practice, and hence may fail to capture variations in the quality of the management processes involved. 

Evidence and analysis

The focus on these practices needs to be combined with questions on how the organisation came to be using them, which specific benefits management tools and techniques are used, and the extent to which benefits management is embedded across different parts of the organisation. There is increasing recognition among researchers that more attention needs to be paid to the adoption of benefits management, which reinforces the case for translation as a theoretical lens.

Our initial investigation has looked at the evidence available on the translation of benefits management, as a precursor to primary research on translation processes. We traced its development at a global level, to identify the changes in translation processes over time, and the current geographical patterns of usage at a macro scale. This analysis is used in conjunction with the limited evidence available on translation processes at an organisational level – the micro scale – to identify key factors for the future adoption of benefits management.

Our macro-scale analysis identified different stages in benefits management’s development, in which additional layers have built up over time. 

Birth of the discipline

Benefits management emerged from the onset of new types of projects in the 1990s: business-related IT investments, which were increasingly complex and high risk. Pioneering consultancies and universities, working largely independently, developed frameworks for managing benefits that were qualitatively different from previous investment appraisal techniques in the rigour attached to the conceptualisation of benefits and the integration within a project, programme or portfolio management context. 

This first stage was followed by the incorporation of benefits management into project management and IT guidance in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By the mid 2000s, many countries had incorporated it into the central project management guidance sponsored by governments and professional bodies. 

In the late 2000s, a third layer emerged, as networks began to develop to share experiences and promote the practice, such as APM’s Benefits Management Specific Interest Group (SIG). 

Alongside this, organisations began to benchmark their usage of it against models to assess organisations’ capabilities and maturity. Surveys of the use of benefits management practices have consistently identified a low level of uptake and found that, even when they are accepted within an organisation, there may be limited application, or the approach may be watered down. 

The fourth layer is the accreditation of expertise through bespoke qualifications, such as the APMG-International foundation and practitioner certificates in benefits management. 

Wide but thin
The evidence suggests that benefits management has spread widely but thinly. Many of the developments in the field have been led by the English-speaking world, but it now has a global reach, with language and cultural barriers being overcome. 

Surprisingly, the limited evidence available suggests little difference in the uptake of benefits management practices among newcomers, such as Brazil, compared with countries at the vanguard, such as the UK.

At the macro scale, there are many possible scenarios for the future of benefits management, ranging from limited spread beyond existing users to spectacular expansion once a ‘tipping point’ has been reached. More likely is something in between these two poles.  

Use of evidence

As researchers have started to recognise the importance of the factors influencing the adoption of benefits management, an evidence base has started to develop on the transfer of the practices between and within organisations. Much of this research is being undertaken in mainland Europe, and particularly in the public sector in Scandinavia. 

One piece of research identified the key factors for the adoption of benefits management as cultivating an organisational culture conducive to it, finding the additional resources and time required for the processes, and identifying tools that were easy to learn and use. However, there is limited empirical evidence on the introduction and subsequent embedding of benefits management to verify this.

The APM Benefits Management SIG committee has undertaken its own small-scale surveys of SIG members (see Project, Spring 2015, page 14), aiming to add to the evidence on the barriers affecting the translation of benefits management. These surveys suggest that benefits management is highly relevant to the challenges faced by organisations, but turning that initial interest into action is problematic. It may be difficult to fit into existing management routines, leading to resistance from some quarters. This can hamper its usefulness, particularly if there is a continuing lack of consensus about its role and scope. 

What are the implications of a translation lens for practice, particularly for those of us who wish to promote benefits management’s uptake? The main lesson is that translation needs to be actively managed, from overcoming the initial hurdles in achieving adoption to eventually building it into organisational routines and processes. 

Actively managing the translation process may mean striking a balance between a willingness to adapt benefits management to fit into organisational practices and a willingness not to compromise on the key principles. These points are particularly important, given the barriers to its translation, but could apply to the adoption of any management idea. 

Dr Richard Breese is a senior lecturer at Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University. Stephen Jenner is a corporate educator at the Graduate School of Business, Queensland University of Technology. Carlos Eduardo Martins Serra is an independent project management researcher, author and speaker. John Thorp is a management consultant and president of The Thorp Network.

The full academic paper upon which this article is based is

Breese, R., Jenner, S., Thorp, J. (2015).  Benefits management: Lost or found in translation.  International Journal of Project Management, 33(7) pp 1438-1451.