Quantifying the benefits of information management
Benefits can be achieved in three areas: better information, better information management and better technology management. The benefit that matters to business users is the first: the impact of the right people having the right information at the right time.
To paraphrase PRINCE2 (project management standard) and MSP (programme management standard), a benefit must be measurable and is usually monetary. (Neither features of solutions nor the changes in working practice that they enable, are benefits.) As well as taking standard practice from PRINCE2 and MSP, the Bramble.cc vREAL method encapsulates the real-world experience of our senior consultants in both public-sector and commercial practice. It is specific to information services and identifies savings, the impact on core business, the reduction of business risks and the value added to assets and customers.
Benefits identification
Combining information mapping with ‘systems thinking’ allows Bramble.cc to define benefits unambiguously. Our approach clarifies the components of the system and their relationships to each other, to facilitate the discovery of the impacts of change and to ensure that benefits are not confused, conflated or double-counted. Bramble.cc has a check-list of approximately 50 different benefits which may be quantified in some way, and typically identifies more than half of them in each project.
Benefits quantification
The vREAL method encapsulates the parameters, indicators and calculations for all the benefits that Bramble.cc has modelled to date in a massive spreadsheet. This provides a ‘value model’ with which to calculate rapidly and in successively more precise iterations the value to be expected from planned business changes.
This lets us investigate scenarios (‘what if’ modelling), to select the approach that will maximize the achievement of benefits. The scenario calculation values also provide business-based performance criteria which can be used to:
- Estimate a base-line before implementation
- Test the acceptability of the solution during pilot before roll-out
- Measure progress towards achieving benefits during roll-out.
The value model also summarizes the values of benefits by type and stages them year-by-year, ready for carrying over to the business case.
Benefits profiling
For every benefit there must be an owner, a manager responsible for bringing about the business change enabled by the project. The unambiguous identification of each benefit and the indicators used in calculating and measuring the benefit ensure that business change managers have a clear understanding of what is required of them, and form the basis of a profile for each benefit. The vREAL checklist of benefits enables swift compilation of a set of benefits profiles. The benefits linkage tools enable a business change manager to understand the dependencies between the planned benefits, business change and the project outputs.
