Benefits Management in Health and Care part 1: Identify and map target benefits

On Thursday 24 October Kevin Parry FAPM, APM Benefits and Value SIG volunteer, presented to the DHSC Project Delivery Profession’s quarterly meeting, held in London and via video-link in Leeds.

This was the first of a two-part presentation on managing benefits at the request of the Head of Profession at DHSC. This first part covered the identification of potential benefits and what good articulation of benefits looks like.

Kevin started with an explanation of APM Benefits Management Lifecycle Model and how this simple conceptual model is much harder to apply in practice as a result of real-world complexities and human factors such as political pressures and optimism bias.

From this, he opened the discussion of what we mean by "value" and "benefits" in a health and social care setting, how this relates to the linear (waterfall) and agile approaches to projects, and the "tranche" concept in programme management, including qualitative and emergent benefits.

Finally, he presented a selection of tools and techniques for modelling and communicating the relationship of strategic objectives to benefits, via target outcomes, using the definition tools and the change consequence tools, firstly separately and then together.

This was followed by a lively discussion and a presentation by the Senior Responsible Owner (SRO0 of a Major Projects Portfolio programme in the NHS, which picked up the themes of identifying and planning benefits on a national scale of significant transformation.

In the next presentation, Kevin will continue the lifecycle theme by discussing planning the realisation of benefits and where this can fall down (and so what actions can project and programme leaders take?).

With special thanks to Jo, Programme Manager and Deputy Head of Profession at DHSC for her help with the material and arrangements.

Kevin has kindly made his presented slides available to view on APM Slideshare and below for reference.