In my capacity as a practicing Change Manager I have been looking closely at the subject of Benefits Management. I was drawn to it because it was clear to me that, appropriately managed, this was an approach with enormous potential as a vehicle for achieving effective organizational change. For me, the most striking feature of Benefits Management is the opportunities it presents, across the entire change lifecycle, to engage and implicate personnel from the whole organisation. The approach negates many of the issues surrounding stakeholder management and in particular change resistance, which can be completely mitigated.
However, I feel that to date, Benefits Management, by being promoted in the main by the Project Management fraternity, has not been exploited sufficiently for Change Management worth and utility. In the author’s opinion, organisational Change Management, a management discipline in its own right, must be able to call upon the capabilities of all other related disciplines to contribute to the delivery of its goals; in this case benefits and project management.
By their very nature, projects and programmes are both objective and temporal in nature whilst Change Management with its unique pan-organizational positional influence, is more subjective and, with the interests of the whole organization in its scope, provides for a continuum that personnel, being able to move between projects and programmes, are able to embrace the organization’s Change Management ethos.