Enhancing Organisational Maturity with Benefits Management

34 International Journal of Information Technology Project Management, 6(4), 34-47, October-December 2015

Copyright © 2015, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

ABSTRACTThe business challenges that some companies face require enterprise-wide solutions that call for an integrated approach and an effective management of organisational resources in order to achieve business objectives with an acceptable level of risk. A maturity model is an improvement approach which provides organisations with the essential elements for effective change. The maturity models process helps to integrate traditionally separate organisational functions, enhances goals and priorities, supplies guidance for quality processes and shares benchmarks for appraising current outcomes. The benefits management approach emerges as a complement to traditional management practices and proposes a continuous mapping of business benefits and the implementation and monitoring of intermediate results. Benefits management reinforces the distinction between project results and business benefits. Based on a case study, the authors show how a set of business objectives derived from a maturity level upgrade can be obtained from identifying, structuring and monitoring objectives and benefits. This was supported by information technology enablers and organisational changes which were all framed in an organisational maturity level that had been previously measured.

Enhancing Organisational Maturity with Benefits

ManagementJorge Gomes, ISEG - Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

Mário Romão, ISEG - Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

Keywords: Benefits Management, Benefits Realisation, IS/IT Investments, Maturity Models, Programme and Project Management

INTRODUCTION

All organisations are interested in finding ways in which they can ensure their long-term vi-ability, whether they are private firms looking to maximise their shareholder value, or public sector and not-for-profit organisations seeking to maximise their effectiveness. Gaining a com-petitive advantage over competitors has been the focus of organisations for a long time, as only a

competitive advantage can assure the long term existence of the organisation (Jugdev & Mathur, 2006). Firms that have captured a competitive advantage (Porter, 1984) are attempting to maintain their competitiveness by increasing knowledge and by managing that knowledge. In a competitive environment, organisations need flexibility to meet customers’ demands, by offering customised and high-quality products and services. In the management of projects,

DOI: 10.4018/IJITPM.2015100103


International Journal of Information Technology Project Management, 6(4), 34-47, October-December 2015 35

organising people and work in an appropriate way is a key success factor. The functional organisation, with its distinct hierarchy is be-ing abandoned in the modern business world and other organisational structures that enable higher flexibility are becoming more and more dominant (Dinsmore & Cooke-Davies, 2006). In order for organisations to succeed in the global business competitive environment of today, it is necessary for them to produce a high standard of performance.

Basically, the purpose of the Maturity Model (MM) is to provide a framework for improving an organisation’s business result by assessing the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling comparisons with similar organisations, and the measurement of the cor-relation between organisations (Combe, 1998; Ibbs & Kwak, 2000).

There are a number of reasons why organi-sations might choose to use a MM to assess their current performance, such as: justifying their investment portfolio, programme or project management improvements, gaining recognition of service quality in order to sup-port proposals, or gaining a better understand-ing of their strengths and weakness in order to enable improvement to happen. The MM is an important element of strategic planning, as it provides a methodology, a road map, to deter-mine and compress the gaps in resources and quality (Kerzner, 2005). Working with different types of projects within an organisation requires standard models in order to deliver successful projects in the future repeatedly, to improve both the quality of future projects and also to gain knowledge and learn from past mistakes.

According to Andersen and Jessen (2003), measuring maturity in organisations is re-garded as a subjective, instead of an objective measurement, since most significant research is primarily focusing on what people do op-erationally. Skulmoski (2001) recommends a view where competence and maturity should be linked together for project success and that one should not focus only on action and where

competence should be regarded as a combina-tion of knowledge, skills and attitudes, that work together to support performance. The assessment procedures helps an organisation understand where they have been, where they are, and what processes they need to implement, in order to continue their implementation of management methodologies. As organisations mature in business and project management processes and also their use of information tech-nology, they implement centralised solutions to facilitate these processes. Since 1995, due to the recognition of the importance of benefits realisation and management within different sectors, various approaches and models have been developed to help organisations identify, monitor and ultimately achieve the benefits. It is unlikely that benefits will simply emerge, as if by magic, from the introduction of a new technology. Their realisation needs to be care-fully planned and managed (Markus, 2004).

Benefits are often identified in the early stages to form the business case and to sell the idea to stakeholders. A follow-up procedure with the purpose of evaluating those benefits achieved is often missing, and problems arise after system delivery, by which it’s time to show whether those previously stated benefits have actually been realised (Remenyi, Money, & Bannister, 2007). One of the factors that differentiates successful from less success-ful companies in their deployment of IS/IT, is the management resolve to evaluate IS/IT investments before and after they occur. The perception of continuous unsuccessful IS/IT investments led to a new way and approach for how projects are managed. The focus should now be on the realisation of the benefits, since this is the main reason for an organisation’s investment (Ward & Daniel, 2006).

In the following sections we introduce and discuss the concept of the MM and its useful-ness and limitations. The Benefits Management (BM) approach used in the integration process with a MM is also addressed. We then present a case study to illustrate such integration, where



we show the results of the organisational ma-turity assessment and also how it is used in the implementation of the chosen BM approach.

MATURITY MODELS

These models are usually divided into progres-sive maturity levels, which allows an organisa-tion to plan how to reach higher maturity levels and enables them to evaluate their outcomes on achievement.

According to Levin and Skulmoski (2000), MM provide a framework to help enable organisations to increase their capability to deliver projects on schedule, within budget and in accordance with the desired technical performance. The works of Ibbs and Kwak, (1997; 2000), and Ibbs and Reginato (2002) over the last decade focused on recognising the benefits of investment in project management competency through measures of maturity in an organisation’s practice of project management. We now move on to make a brief description of the three most popular and referenced MM, analyse the singularities of each one and find the approach that fits better with the dynamic characteristics of the organization used for the case study .

The CMMI emerged in 1987 as the Capabil-ity Maturity Model (CMM), a project from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), which is a research centre at Carnegie-Mellon Univer-sity. This centre was established and funded by the United States Department of Defence. The CMM for Software was first published in 1991 and is based on a checklist of critical suc-cess factors of software development projects from during the late 70s and early 80s. CMM has achieved considerable popularity and is now well-adopted and has undergone several revisions and upgrades. Its success led to the development of CMMs for a variety of subjects beyond software. The proliferation of new mod-els was confusing and so the US government funded a two-year project that involved more than 200 industry and academic experts to create a single, extensible framework that integrated

systems engineering, software engineering and product development. The result was CMMI. This framework defines sets of best practices that are grouped into process areas used by prod-uct development organisations to implement and improve the predictability of their project costs and schedules. This model consists of transcend-ing disciplines by offering best practices through the pointing out development and maintenance programmers, covering the whole life cycle of the product from conceptualisation to delivery and maintenance. Considerable research has been done to determine the best software and systems engineering development, acquisi-tion, and sustainable practices. Many of these practices are part of the CMMI framework. The five-step CMMI process is used to establish an organisation’s current maturity level.

No discussion of organisational project management maturity would be complete without the mention of OPM3, the PMI’s organisational project management maturity model. The PMBOK Guide describes a pro-cess model for the execution of single projects with five process groups, including thirty-nine processes, divided into core and facilitating processes (PMI, 2008). Organisational project management, as defined in OPM3, requires an understanding of not only project management and its processes, but also portfolio and pro-gramme management. The development of this standard was inspired by an increasing interest in a MM that shows a step-by-step method of improving and maintaining an organisation’s ability to translate organisational strategy into the successful and consistent delivery of proj-ects. OPM3 is the systematic management of projects, programmes, and portfolios, in align-ment with the objective to achieve strategic goals. OPM3 does not measure the maturity of the organisation at an achieved level, as is the case with many other MM, but as a percentage of best practices achieved.

OGC (2010) describes P3M3 as a key standard amongst MM, providing a framework with which organisations can assess their cur-rent performance and put in place improvement plans. The P3M3 is an enhanced version of the



Project Management Maturity Model, which is itself based on the process maturity framework that evolved into the SEI Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Although connected, there are no interdependencies between these models, which allows for independent assessment in any of the specific disciplines. P3M3 uses a five level maturity framework and focuses on seven process perspectives, which exist in all three models and can be assessed at all five maturity levels. For each of the process areas a number of attributes are defined at each level of maturity. These attributes are the basis on which the organisation should assess its current maturity and make plans to improve.

The concept of organisational project management is based on the idea that there is a correlation between an organisation’s capability in terms of project, programme and portfolio management, and also its effectiveness in implementing strategy. The degree to which an organisation practices this type of project management is referred to as its ‘organisational project management maturity’.

MATURITY MODELS LIMITATIONS

MM are now in widespread use, but there seems to be some inefficiency in their success in achieving performance improvements. In fact, there is little evidence to suggest that process capability improvement results in improved project success, although a few studies are promising (Mullaly, 2006; Lee & Anderson, 2006). No studies have been able to show that using MM or assessing project management maturity results in a sustained competitive ad-vantage for an organisation (Jugdev & Thomas, 2002). MM claim to represent all the processes present for a project to be successful (Sargeant, 2010; Kerzner, 1998).

Unfortunately, this assertion is not sup-ported by evidence, with many models either lacking empirical evidence to support the use of particular measures (Skulmoski, 2001), or lacking a theoretical basis (Jugdev & Thomas, 2002).

Many factors that impact performance are not specifically addressed by MM (Sargeant, 2010; Lee & Anderson, 2006). Another under-pinning assumption is that an improvement in process maturity will yield an improvement in the overall maturity of the organisation. Nei-ther of these assumptions has been empirically tested. MM are characterised as being “step-by-step recipes” that oversimplify reality and lack empirical foundation (De Bruin, Rosemann, Freeze, & Kulkarni, 2005; King & Kraemer, 1984; McCornack et al., 2009). Moreover, MM tend to neglect the potential existence of multiple equally-advantageous paths (Teo & King, 1997). According to Mettler and Rohner (2009), MM should be configurable because internal and external characteristics (e.g., the technology available, intellectual property, customer base and relationships with suppliers) may constrain a maturity model’s applicability in its standardised version (Iversen, Nielsen, & Norbjerg, 1999). King and Kraemer (1984) pos-tulate that MM should not focus on a sequence of levels toward a predefined “end state”, but rather on factors that drive evolution and change.

Gareis and Hueman (2000) reject the no-tion of a maturity ladder of stages, the argument being that a ladder model might be too rigid. Instead, they opt for a spider web presenta-tion, which allows for more differentiation in describing the competencies needed to handle the specific processes of the project-oriented or-ganisation. Ibbs and Kwak (2000) demonstrated that there is no statistically significant correla-tion between project management maturity and project success, based on cost and schedule performance. Jugdev and Thomas (2002) could not find a correlation between process capabil-ity and project success of many MM. Mullaly (2006) raised the concern of the lack of evidence of PMM’s contribution on organisation success as a means of competitive advantage.

BENEFITS MANAGEMENT

The challenges faced by organisations to increase value from there IS/IT investments, together with the low level of organisational



competencies in exploiting IS/IT, were revealed as an underlying cause for the difficulty in deal-ing with these challenges. The benefits expected from any IS/IT implementations are unlikely to emerge automatically. Any benefits sought must first be identified, along with the changes in ways of working that will bring about, and sustain, each of the benefits. Ownership and responsibility for the realisation of each ben-efit must then be assigned, together with how it will be realised, and on whom it depends. The concept of BM is becoming increasingly important in the overall framework of project delivery capability. BM tools and techniques can be included in the strategic planning pro-cess to reinforce and enable organisations in their competitive environments, namely; (1) in carrying out a regular strategic analysis to understand and interpret their business driv-ers and to revise their long-term strategy; (2) by interpreting each objective in terms of the benefits that it could produce for different stakeholders and how these benefits can be measured through key performance indicators (KPIs); (3) identifying the range of changes required to deliver the objectives and the benefits; (4) structuring the changes that en-able programmes and projects to be designed to achieve the desired outcomes; (5) mapping dependencies between projects, programmes or initiatives; and, (6) developing business cases and clearly explaining the objectives and benefits to be achieved. The BM process should be used to guide implementation and review in each individual project and programme, in order to ensure that the benefits of each are delivered. Szczepanek and Winter (2008) claim that projects and programmes should be seen as a value creating process, rather than the old view of being a temporary organisation for production. Recent surveys highlight the need for a more strategic approach to project manage-ment, where value and benefits that contribute to organisations’ success should have greater emphasis. Nowadays projects are not only seen as a tool for solving technical problems, but they are also seen to serve as a vehicle for business and change. Project maturity can be seen as

an indication of the organisation’s ability to initiate and execute projects for different and correct purposes (Boddy, 2002). BM involves the processes for delivering projects’ objectives and goals that are not only based on the outputs of the project, as is common for immature organisations, but also on the measurement of the performance of a specific activity. Change management is a central topic, as well as being a way of measuring long term achievement for an organisation’s customer satisfaction, through the delegation of responsibilities and coordina-tion between several projects. To achieve a high maturity rating within BM, frequent collection and analysis of performance metrics should be made for the improvement of future projects.

Ward and Daniel (2006) note that the purpose of any IS/IT investment is to deliver improvements in organisational performance, and thus it would seem logical that the key process around which others should fit, is that of benefit management, rather than the project management, investment appraisal or systems development approaches. This process is formu-lated as an interrelated tool or framework that can be used to guide and structure the planning and actions needed to successfully implement a project. The inherent processes enable organisa-tions to utilize their existing methodologies, in conjunction with the BM process. BM can be described as: “The process of organising and managing, such that potential benefits arising from the use of IT are actually realised” (Ward & Daniel, 2006, p. 384). In summary, benefits management is a process of organising and managing IS/IT (Ward & Daniel, 2006). Its objective is to ensure that the potential benefits arising from the use of information technology in organisations are actually attainable. BM process is structured in five fundamental phases: (1) identify and structure benefits; (2) plan the realisation of benefits; (3) execute benefits plan; (4) review and evaluate the benefits, and; (5) identify potential for further benefits.

The initial phase is probably the most com-plex one in the whole process, and it is a critical one. In this phase, all potential benefits should be identified, classified according to their nature,



and located within the organisation’s processes. The key tool of this approach is the Benefits Dependency Network (BDN), which is de-signed to enable the achievement of investment objectives and their resulting benefits should be linked in a structured way to the business, and to the required IS/IT changes, in order to realise those benefits. Once the BDN has been constructed, then measures for each benefit, responsibilities for achieving all the benefits and implementing all the changes, and time frames must be established. The organisation needs to set targets and identify and quantify benefits, after removing known problems through new IS/IT means and identify new ways of execut-ing business processes and activities. The main challenge is agreeing on the best combination of the ways and means for accomplishing the improvements. Once the business strategy for the organisation has been determined, it is then necessary to develop an IS/IT strategy.

The following answers are used to develop both a robust business case for investment and a viable change management plan to deliver benefits: (1) why must we improve?; (2) what improvements are necessary or pos-sible?; (3) what benefits will be realised by each stakeholder if the investment objectives are achieved?; (4) how will each benefit be measured?; (5) who owns each benefit and will they be accountable for its delivery?; (6) what changes are needed to achieve each benefit?; (7) who will be responsible for ensuring that each change is successfully made?, and; (8) how and when can the identified changes be made?

According to Ward and Daniel (2006), in order to agree on the objectives and benefits it is advisable to organise workshops with all the relevant stakeholders who are looking to meet the alignment needed to develop the BDN. Bennington and Baccarini (2004) suggest that benefits identification should be a combined approach of interviews and workshops, involv-ing key stakeholders. Ward and Daniel (2006) identify that which distinguishes successful, from less successful, organisations in benefits realisation, namely: (1) using methodologies

together and consistently for all projects; (2) including a wide range of stakeholder benefits in the business cases and not just financial ones; (3) not overstating benefits in order to gain fund-ing; (4) integrating a plan for benefit delivery using organisational process and technology changes; (5) nominating business ownership and accountability for the benefits and changes; (6) managing the benefits over the whole in-vestment lifecycle through consistently applied project governance roles and processes; (7) systematic review of the results of investments in terms of the benefits realised, or not realised, and; (8) transferring the lessons learned from successful and unsuccessful projects to others.

Bennington and Baccarini (2004) argue that most organisations do not monitor benefits, for several reasons, namely: lack of experience and/or business awareness; focus on managing deliverables rather than benefits; lack of focus on the people who will gain from the benefits; emotional commitment to the continuity of the project; not being open to change benefits that threaten project viability, and; the lack of tools to help ensure that benefits will be delivered. Assessing benefits is an on-going process, because some benefits may not be immediate and will only appear at a later stage when the system has been fully integrated into the running of the organisation by all of its users (Caldeira, Serrano, Quaresma, Pedron, & Romão, 2012).

P3M3 SELF-ASSESSMENT

Considering the three approaches described above, and being aware of the advantages and limitations of satisfying the particular business organisation characteristics and the market constraints, we decided to adopt P3M3. The reasons for selecting P3M3 model were mainly the following: (1) it is a public model, in which all characteristics and sample questions and necessary information are available online; (2) it is updated frequently; (3) it contains three different perspectives, where the questions are easily addressed to either project managers or



senior management, and; (4) it already includes benefits management as a process perspective/dimension in the maturity model.

The complexity of change management should be built into the organisation’s frame-work in order to deliver attractive projects for customers. The definition of the dependencies between the benefits to be delivered must be presented and understood, as must the descrip-tion of how to carry out the work necessary to achieve the desired benefits, and not just the project outputs. P3M3 (OGC, 2010) gives an opportunity to use a self-assessment process to evaluate and measure project maturity. Our linking process intends to use the BM, not only as a contained process area, but also as a process that crosses all process areas. We have also decided to undertake a self-assessment process to collect the information needed to obtain the correct organisational maturity “picture”. The organisation under study is assessed in order to satisfy the next two following questions: “where we are now?” and “where do we want to be?”. This self-assessment will be crucial to feed the strategic analysis that endorses the organisation’s choice of drivers for the invest-ments and for the identification and structur-ing of the benefits beyond the objectives. The first step regarded clearly defining what the assessment aims to achieve and how this will be undertaken. Given that the assessment is a defined set of deliverables, to be created by a defined team within a defined time frame, it makes more sense to establish and run this self-assessment as a project. This step thus involves creating project initiation documentation aimed at answering the following questions: (1) what is the purpose of the assessment?; (2) how will we measure success?; (3) what is the scope of the assessment?; (4) how many programmes/projects need to be included, and which ones will be covered?; (5) how long will it take?, and; (6) how much will it cost?

In the end, the organisation expected the following benefits: (1) evidence of success and improvements related to the targets; (2) reduced bureaucracy through streamlined processes; (3) reduced overheads; (4) better control of

resources; (5) reliable and quicker information; (6) a higher-performing workforce, and; (7) credibility and the achievement of sustained and meaningful change. To undertake the as-sessment it was necessary to gather information on the status of the organisation’s projects. This was done through using face-to-face inter-views and questionnaires. Prior to conducting the interviews, an assessment of current the documentation of management processes is undertaken, to gain an initial understanding of the organization, as well as a view of how initiatives should be managed. Sponsors pro-gramme and project managers are selected to cover a range of projects and programmes in terms of size and life cycle stage.

Documentary evidence mentioned during interviews is reviewed and assessed against ma-turity level criteria. Documentation pertaining to specific initiatives was reviewed during, and at the end of the interviews. Once the information collected can be assessed against the criteria and a report can be produced, it became relatively easy to analyse the information and come up with a maturity level. However, the real value lies not just in identifying a maturity level, but also in understanding how the different perspectives interact and to ascertain what the implications of the maturity assessment are, as well as the recommendations for improving the capability of management. Analysis of the interviews and documentation provides a maturity score for each management perspective.

The maturity level is the median score of the assessments for each management perspec-tive. The assessment contains nine questions for project, programme and portfolio, resulting in a total of 27 questions, with five different alternatives where the user must decide which of the five descriptions best represents the organisation’s current capability.

CASE STUDY

We developed a case-study in a small-medium company that provides application services for the acquisition of geographic information-based



digital aerial photography from airborne plat-forms. This firm has also developed geographic information systems for land management, heritage, agricultural registries and road infra-structure, amongst other solutions.

For the purpose of our research, we car-ried out seven face-to-face interviews with two senior managers and five programme managers, distributed questionnaires to fifteen project managers and collected a sample of the documentation for all of the areas. As expla-nied before, we followed the “P3M3® v2.1 Self-Assessment” for the instructions and the questionnaire (OGC, 2008). The questionnaire contained nine questions, one for each of the seven process perspectives contained within the approach, covering: Management Control, Benefits Management, Financial Management,

Stakeholder Engagement, Risk Management, Organisational Governance, Resource Manage-ment and two more overall organisation MM. The organisation does not have all the seven analysed processes, and there was no evidence of a benefits management process.

The major issues are the following (Table 1 and Table 2).

The results of the self-assessment give the organisation a maturity stage of below 2 on the majority of the process areas (Table 3). It should be noted that the overall assessed maturity level is equal to the lowest score for the process perspectives. Therefore, after a broad and open internal discussion with the senior managers, business managers, IS/IT specialists and others relevant stakeholders, they all agreed that stage two will be the immediate target to achieve.

Table 1. Self - assessment questions and results

Question 1 – The overall organisational maturity levels. The results: Processes are not usually documented and there are no, or only a few, process descriptions. Processes are undeveloped or incomplete

Question 2 - Management control is characterised by clear evidence of leadership and direction, scope, stages, tranches and review processes during the course of the initiative. The results: Programme or project management terminology is used by some members of the organisation, but not consistently, and it is possibly not understood by all the stakeholders.

Question 3 – Benefit dependencies and other requirements are clearly defined and an understanding is gained on how the outputs of the initiative will meet those requirements. The results: Poor evidence.

Question 4 – There should be evidence of the appropriate involvement of the organisation’s financial functions. The results: Programme or project business cases are produced in various forms. Overall cost is not monitored or fully accounted for.

Question 5 - Stakeholder engagement includes communications planning, the effective identification and use of different communications channels and techniques to enable the objectives to be achieved. The results: Stakeholder engagement and communication is rarely used by programmes or projects as an element of the delivery toolkit.

Question 6 - Risk management maintains a balance of focus on threats and opportunities, with appropriate management actions to minimise, or eliminate, the likelihood of any identified threat occurring, or to minimise its impact if it does occur, and to maximise opportunities. The results: There is minimal evidence of risk management being used to any beneficial effect in programmes.

Question 7 - How the delivery of initiatives is aligned to the strategic direction of the organisation. The results: Programme or project management from an organisational perspective is beginning to take shape, but with ad hoc controls and no clear strategic control.

Question 8 - A key element of resource management is the process for acquiring resources and how supply chains are utilized to maximise effective use of resources. The results: There is some recognition within the organisation of the need to manage resources effectively to enable successful delivery of programmes or projects, but there is little evidence of resource acquisition, planning or management.

Question 9 - The overall organisational capability maturity evaluation. The results: Programmes and projects may be running informally with no standard processes or tracking system.



Maturity level 2 is characterised by basic management practices, such as ensuring that tracking expenditure and scheduling resources are in place and are being improved. Key indi-viduals are trained and demonstrate a success-ful track record and it is through them that the organisation is capable of repeating success. Initiatives are performed and managed ac-cording to their documented plans and project status and delivery is visible to management at defined points. To ensure that the benefits from the investments are indeed realised, two ques-tions need to be answered: “What benefits are we seeking?”, and “How we will get them?”. The following BM activities required to start the process are: analyze the drivers to determine

the investment objectives; identify the benefits that will be measured; establish the ownership of the benefits; identify the changes required and the stakeholder implications and produce an initial business case. Two internal workshops were organised to promote further discussion and sharing of knowledge and expertise. The ability of all the stakeholders to commit the time and resources required by the project also needs to be ensured. The outputs from the workshops will form the basis of the business case and benefits plan and they should become integral components of the overall project plan.

In order to manage an investment properly, it is essential that we can know that the benefits have actually been realised and therefore the

Table 2. Self - assessment classification

P3M3 Model Classification

Questions a b c d e level

1 How our organisation can be characterised x 1

2 How our management control is best described x 1

3 How our benefits management is best described x 1

4 How our financial management is best described x 2

5 How our risk management is best described x 1

6 How our approach to stakeholder management is best described x 1

7 How our organisational governance is best described x 2

8 How our resource management is best described x 1

9 How does the organisation about program/ project management x 1

Table 3. Answers by perspectives

Process Perspectives

Code Capability level 1 2 3 4 5 level

MC Management Control x 1

BM Benefits Management x 1

FM Financial Management x 2

SM Stakeholder Management x 1

RM Risk Management x 1

OG Organisational Governance x 2

RM Resource Management x 1



benefit should be observable, and in some way measurable. Each benefit should be considered in turn and the changes necessary to realise that benefit should then be identified and described in the BDN (Figure 1). Performance only im-proves when people start doing things differ-ently. New ways of working always need some enabling changes. Once the expected benefits from the investment have been identified, it is then important to add two essential pieces of information to each benefit: firstly, how could the benefits be measured? and secondly, who will the owner of the benefit be? Next an owner should be assigned to each benefit. The

BDN (Table 4) enables the investment and the changes to working practices and the processes necessary for delivering each of the benefits that are identified and agreed. An important step in developing a BDN is the identification of the change owners. A good business case should enable the outcome of the investment to be assessed in terms of the benefits delivered, or if they were not achieved, then it should help explain why. Following the full implementa-tion of the outcomes and business changes, the achievement of the business case and benefits plan should then be formally reviewed.

Figure 1. Linking Investment objectives with business benefits

Table 4. Investment objectives and business benefits codification

Investment Objectives Business Benefits

O1 – Improve efficiency and effectiveness O2 – Increasing projects’ success rate O3 – Implementing best practices O4 – Improving internal communication O5 – Better alignment of the organisation O6 – Better customer relationship

B1 – Better skills B2 – Better internal cooperation B3 – More reliable process system B4 – Better time control B5 – Cost reduction B6 – Better services B7– Better internal communication B8 – Better client relationship B9 – Better team work



The review should include a detailed assess-ment of whether each of the intended benefits has been achieved, or not. This stage provides the opportunity to plan for, and realise further benefits, as well as to learn from the overall process. The benefits review may identify op-portunities for the realisation of benefits that were not identified at the start of the process. Such opportunities may arise at any time during, or after, the process, and mechanisms should be put in place to capture these opportunities and to exploit them, by bringing these new benefits within the scope of IS/IT investment (OGC, 2010). In P3M3, the BM appears with a “verti-cal dimension”. By using the BDN we noticed that the BM could be advantageous as a means for integrating initiatives for other processes, in order to synchronise and align the execution of the transformation in order to achieve benefits. Thus, the BDN is an instrument for capturing and visualizing integrative initiatives from dif-ferent areas of the organisation for achieving benefits. That is to say, in the context of P3M3, BM should also be considered in a “horizontal dimension”, as it transversely integrates the initiatives and dependencies between various fields of the overall maturity of the organisation.

We have built the BDN “left side”, con-sidering the enablers and changing elements (Table 5 and Figure 2).

CONCLUSION

The BM is becoming increasingly important in overall frameworks for project delivery capabil-ity. The primary benefits to be created as a result of a project or programme need to be identified and monitored in a non-bureaucratic way.

The authors claim that by integrating both BM and MM approaches, that one can increase the effectiveness of strategic projects and improve the confidence of business spon-sors that their investment in projects will return business benefits. A higher level of maturity is achieved when organisations assess their capabilities and benchmark their performance against standards and competitors. Knowing beforehand the impact that process maturity has on the organisations performance, it is essential that one can focus on eliminating the internal resistance to change, taking advantage of the favourable factors that positively influence organisational maturity. By using a Benefits Management approach we have shown how to record the business drivers, discuss them with all the relevant stakeholders, agree on the objectives and the benefits and on the organisa-tional changes, as well as on the right set of IS/IT enablers needed to prompt transformation. Benefits Management adds value and provides relevant information to the MM framework by

Table 5. Enablers and changing elements

Enablers IS/IT Enabling Changes Business Changes

T1 – Project management tool T2 – Management System tool T3 – Customer management tool T4 – Intranet T5 – Website

E1 – Project management training E2 – Quality training E3 – Intranet training E4 – Communication training E5 – Team building E6 – Customer management training E7 – Creating KPIs E8 – New services identification E9 – Encourage internal relationship E10 – Processes new design

C1 – Project planning C2 – Formal management C3 – Performance management tool C4 – Lessons learned C5 – Individual evaluation



identifying goals and benefits, mapping the way to achieve them, supported by the right com-bination of organisational changes, enabling factors and IS/IT enablers.

The authors claim that Benefits Man-agement provides a richer and more useful decision-support and monitoring tool, making the strategy implementation visible, trace-able and measurable. Developing a Benefits Dependency Network results in a clear state-ment of the benefits from an investment, the activities and the IT capabilities required to achieve these benefits. Benefits Management not only increases the potential to obtain value from investments, but it also avoids spending money on projects that would not have delivered benefits, increasing greatly the likelihood of the expected benefits from investments made. In our integrated approach, the MM is designed to enable organisations to understand their current level of maturity, highlighting areas

that would give them the most value as well as performance improvement in the short and long terms. Thereafter, our study is an attempt to reinforce the use of maturity models in a more integrated way. We have approached the Ben-efits Management process and explained how it could be seen as a more transversal process by integrating the initiatives from distinct areas of the overall organisational maturity.

Lastly, but not least, the authors point out that the main focus of an investment’s success lies, not only in technology implementation, but mainly in changes in organisational per-formance and business efficiency, through improved processes and modifications in the way that work is done. The integration between a MM and a BM approach can then increase the effectiveness of projects, programmes or portfolios management outcomes. Besides, this linkage can also improve the confidence of decision-makers that the investments made

Figure 2. Linking organisational changes to business benefits



match the desired maturity stages and will then, with more probability, result in more value for the business.

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Jorge Gomes is a PhD student of Management at ISEG – Lisboa School of Economics & Management. He holds a Masters in Management from ISCTE-IUL, and a degree in Geographic Engineering from the Faculty of Sciences of the Universidade de Lisboa. During the past 30 years he has worked as an engi-neer, project manager and a quality auditor. His research interests include Benefits Management, Project Management, Maturity Models and IS/IT Investments.

Mário José Batista Romão is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at ISEG – Lisboa School of Economics & Management, Universidade de Lisboa. He is Director of the Masters programme in Project Management. He holds a PhD in Management Sciences from ISCTE-IUL and another PhD in Computer Integrated Manufacturing from Cranfield University (UK). He also holds an MsC in Telecommunica-tions and Computer Science from the IST - Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa. He is a Postgraduate in Project Management and holds the international certification of Project Management Professional (PMP) from PMI – Project Management International. He also has a degree in Electrotecni-cal Engineering from the IST.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/AMR.2001.4011928

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2007.08.015

Enhancing Organisational Maturity with Benefits Management

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