How can you effectively manage project benefits and value realization?

It will benefit PM greatly if the BA or the business analyst are part of the initiation stage of the project. Understanding the business benefits from the startup will greatly affect the management practices and procedures.

One of the main challenges particularly with projects and value realization is that the value is typically realized after the project ends, requiring either an organizational function such as a Project Management Office (PMO) or Value Realization Office (VRO) to continue to track value is realized and what the realization schedule is. As well as identifying the different parts of the organization that are required to contribute to the value being realized if it is beyond the project scope. Or structure delivery as agile value streams instead of projects. As we now typically operate in a complex system, it is important to understand that the benefits and value are hypotheses, and we will need to learn and adapt over time.

Understand the affect of exceeding the stakeholders expectations and closely address the issues that relates to the stakeholders expectations.

It is critically important to identify who will be responsible and accountable for the value following the end of the project and they have the resources needed to realize the value. Frequently projects end and there is no one accountable and therefore resources and activities are not adapted as the business or other situation changes resulting in value loss.

I've found it valuable to make the value reporting transparent and public, as it makes it easier to have the right discussions on course correction if value isn't being realized as expected or being blocked for some reason. As well as making work in the system more visible to help people understand the impact of reallocating resources on value being delivered to something else.

Value can be more than just financial value. Other types of value might require other types of measurement strategies, for example risk minimization or a project to support compliance which may not return a financial benefit but allows an organization, if regulated to continue to operate. Additionally, the context of the value might change, and either be amplified, reduced or become obsolete, there needs to be periodic re-evaluation of the value realization plan and either actions taken to preserve or enhance value or work stopped if value is no longer achievable or no longer required.

If the tracking and reporting in step 3 is transparent, then this reduces some of the effort associated reporting here. For value to be realized in some cases organization change is required. For example if the benefit is productivity savings, then there will need to be a people action either their spare capacity is repurposed for something else, they produce more widgets in the same time or other action. The impacts of these changes will frequently not be considered as part of the initial value case and need to be learned from, to be planned for in future.