Benefits Management Approach

Here you can find a simple Benefits Management Approach template in Microsoft Word/Excel format, along with explanation on how to use it.

Download the Template

Background

Let’s say you’re initiating a project to create a mobile app for your business, and you believe that it will increase your sales. The idea is that this benefit should be tracked after the project is finished, because:

You can learn from it and use that knowledge in your future projects
You may have to do small things to help those benefits realize

So, in the beginning of the project, when we are thinking about the benefits, we will document them in the Benefits Management Approach, and explain how we can measure them in the future. For example, you find a way to track what sales are generated because of the existence of that app, and then start calculating the profit that is caused by that app. In addition to that, the app may also help the existing customers, and by increasing their satisfaction, they will buy again. In that case, this can be another benefit of the app; but, how are you going to distinguish it from other sales? This is when you think about all of that and document it.

Composition

The template has 3 main sections:

Document information: this is the generic information about the document and connections with your Configuration Management system. Feel free to add more information here, but it’s best to keep it simple.
Approval: this section is for capturing approvals. There are multiple lines, because you may have multiple versions of this document approved. If you have a well-formed Configuration Management system to track approvals, feel free to remove this section.
Benefits: here you have a table to define one benefit, mainly by describing how, when, and by whom it’s measured. You certainly have more than one benefit, therefore, you need to add copies of this table and fill it in for each of them. And finally, projects may have dis-benefits too, and it’s a good idea to measure them to be sure that those dis-benefits are not growing higher than a certain level. So, use the same table to describe your dis-benefits.

eLearning Courses

If you’d like to learn everything about PRINCE2, I can suggest our eLearning courses:

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