Are today’s problems the result of yesterday’s perfectly executed solutions? asks Eddie Obeng. Benefits management is a crucial area of project management, often defined as “…increasing the successful delivery of quantifiable and meaningful business benefits to an organisation”. But businesses do not have a great track record in understanding their needs and establishing the right outcomes.
I’ve been asked to deliver a keynote talk at a ‘Benefits management’ conference and it’s given me an ethical dilemma. I’ll explain with an example.
The city of Scottsdale, Arizona in the US had been expanding. As a result, the rattlesnake population had been pushed further up into the mountains, making the mountains more dangerous for hikers, camping, etc. There was a clear need and business case to do something.
To address this challenge, the input from the city leaders was to organise a bounty on rattlesnakes. People started running mini-weekend projects to “go get some snakes”. The snakes were easy to find. Groups of people spread out in a line and listened for their loud rattle. People started bringing in lots of rattlesnakes so, by all measures, the objectives were being met.
But the outcome was not achieved. The mountains have become even more dangerous because they are now inhabited by a growing population of very quiet rattlesnakes.
The big picture is Need – Inputs – Project – Objectives/Outputs – Outcomes (Benefits).
In my book, All Change! I describe the difference between ‘legitimate’ projects – which delivered the outcomes and “non–legitimate” projects, which were often brilliantly executed but didn’t deliver the outcomes. Our ‘old world’ definition of projects is obsolete. In modern complexity, the project leader needs more than a frail grasp of the big picture. Projects must be legitimate. The project leader’s accountability needs to span the chasm from Need to Outcome.
Benefits management is a crucial area of project management, often defined as “…increasing the successful delivery of quantifiable and meaningful business benefits to an organisation”.
But businesses do not have a great track record in understanding their needs and establishing the right outcomes. Ever been reorganised? Did it pay back? Did the people who had left get hired back at higher rates the following month? In fact, mankind does not have a great track record in understanding its needs and establishing the right outcomes. We sparked climate change because we need to transport food to market before it rots. We created benefits dependency traps because we wanted to alleviate poverty. Counterintuitive and unexpected, these are challenges not benefits. They are today’s problems caused by yesterday’s solutions.
So, finally, back to my dilemma with the talk.
I would like the participants to enjoy a great keynote. So, on the one hand, I have to give them ideas, tools and hope on how to deliver benefits. This means I have to encourage them to develop legitimate projects, track through all the stakeholders from need to outcome, find root causes of the need, and check by mapping the future (possibly with scenarios) to ensure that only good things occur as a result of the project.
On the other hand, for the keynote to be successful, I have to get them to stop their current and illegitimate projects. This means I have to explain how they have so far been wasting their lives… It means I have to point out how their efforts are, at best, wasted or, at worst, counterproductive since they are delivering outcomes that will come back – without a warning rattle – to bite their businesses in the future.
Professor Eddie Obeng is author of All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook, published by the Financial Times, as well as nine other books on change. He holds the Sir Monty Finniston award for his pioneering work in the human side of project management and in the frameworks and tools for different types of projects.
Follow him on Twitter @EddieObeng or read his blog at http://ImagineAFish.com