Having considered in our previous blog post the starting
steps of the benefits realisation mapping process, this post will work through
an example of each of those stages and see how we can get from a forest of paper
to a clear map that enables us to distinguish the wood from the trees. Our
example is focused upon a project to create learning material for benefits
realisation.
Step 2 – Whilst this could be
done using a collection of Post It’s, for the purposes of demonstration via the
blog, we are going to add comments to the document using the Review function in
Microsoft Word. Each comment that is added to the document would be a Post It.
Step 3 – Taking the ‘Providing
Realisor Education Material’ document first, we can see that the opening
section specifies the ‘Aims of Realisor Education’ – or the outcomes that we
would like to achieve from the education process.
Referring to Kevin’s recent
blog post on ‘Finding Outcomes and Initiatives in Documents’ here
at this point we do not know if these are separate outcomes, or if when we go
through the rest of the documents that overlapping Post It notes will be
created. So what we need to do at the
point is to comment/create a Post It note of where these came from. Kevin’s
post also considers the naming of Outcomes, using OutcomeJogger as a reference guide –
these are not quite worded as Outcomes yet. Further reading of the document
draws out what types of learning material is likely to be required – this is
what we will do to achieve our Outcomes so we can note these as a set of
Initiatives to be undertaken. Within the strategic objectives section, we note
the key strategic objectives of this project - like within this document, these
can often be found in diagrams within documents. The section covering ‘What
needs to be done’ is more typical of what you may find in a strategy document –
a mix of Initiatives and Outcomes that these connect to. This document has set
out in a manner that is easier to deconstruct for the purposes of this
demonstration but tend to be more typically phrased as per the example given in
the ‘Finding
Outcomes and Initiatives in Documents’ blog post.
In a similar fashion, we go
through the ‘Black Box of Benefits’ document and use the comments to note
anything that could be considered an Outcome, Objective and Initiative. As you
can see across the two documents that we have deconstructed, we have some
Outcomes, Objectives and Initiatives that are the same, both within the
document and across the two documents. As discussed in the previous blog post, ‘Document
Deconstruction’, this can provide key insights into the importance of the
benefits – if you have the same thing noted down several times across the same
or multiple documents, this indicates that it could be a key benefit.
Step 4 – Now it’s time to collect
together all the information you have pulled from the documentation and sort
it into groups, for example by what we call an ‘Initiative’ – where something
is happening or being done and by ‘Benefit or Outcome’, which are the results
of the changes – these can be both positive and negative. You may also find it
helpful to further break down these groupings – during the recent construction
of a benefit map, we found it useful to sort our Outcomes or Benefits into
areas, for example pulling together those relating to technology, relating to
marketing etc. We are also considering at this
point any Initiatives/Outcomes/Objectives that have been duplicated across the
documentation.
Step 5 – The next stage is the
creation of the benefits map – here we are using Realisor to do this. As
discussed in Kevin’s Benefits Unmasked blog post ‘Terminology,
what’s in a name?’, there are many different BRM methodologies – we are
going to be using the Realisor default names of Initiative, Outcome and
Objective (which can be changed within the tool to customise yours or your
customers preferred modelling preference).
Realisor has import template
functionality so we are creating our list of Initiatives, Outcomes and Objectives
in an MS Excel node import. We can add the title we want to give our nodes,
e.g. ‘Increase Realisor Sales’, select the node type and in the description
field we can enter the details of the document that this came from – ‘Providing
Realisor Education Material, page.1’. The description field in Realisor is
searchable within the ‘Search’ tab and so we can easily find any Outcomes that
have originated from the ‘Providing Realisor Education Material’ document for
example. For help with naming your Outcomes, we suggest downloading the free resource OutcomeJogger.
Once we have imported this list
into Realisor to create the nodes on the map, we can start bringing them
together onto a canvas and link them together, to see what Initiatives
contribute to achieving the Outcomes, if there are initiatives that make no
contribution at all and if there are Outcomes that have nothing contributing to
them to enable them to be achieved. It may be worth revisiting the
documentation at this point to see if any obvious links have been noted, i.e.
‘we are doing X to achieve Y’ and there is an element of using your own
judgement to decide what would contribution links would exist. The pulling together of this map will be discussed in the next blog post.
Remember at this point you are
only making a first draft ‘straw man’ map that you will use to take to the
stakeholders for their input.
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