Measuring actual project benefits - How to maintain your project profile and funding
Here are ways to continuously sell your project:
- Bond with your executive sponsor.
- Conduct regular face-to-face meetings.
- Share good news and bad news.
- Participate in executive meetings (ask to present at some).
- Ask about new initiatives or issues and help brainstorm how GIS can extend new initiatives or provide graphical (map-based) decision tools.
- Discuss communications with other departments.
- Get to know the manager of your communications department.
- Ask advice on how to package your message and how to most effectively distribute it (for example, via e-mail, newsletter, video, departmental meetings, etc.).
- Ask when to deliver each message.
- Ask how and when to use your executive sponsor as a communications conduit into the organization.
- Ask advice on how to manage expectations. (Don't oversell!) Here are major selling points that should be covered:
- What it is.
- Why we're doing it.
- What the schedule is.
- What it will cost.
- What the benefits are and where they will come from (everyone wants to know how
his/her group will be affected). For each group, answer the following: Does GIS mean
more work, less work, or different work processes?
The setup and initial delivery is the easy part, the challenge comes in maintaining a corporate
interest in the GIS project. A very effective way to do this is to solicit early GIS adopters from
each department or group within your company. The ideal candidate is a leader in his/her group
and is well respected by everyone in the department. Schedule training for this individual and
then work with the individual to put together a demonstration that this individual can present at
a scheduled departmental meeting and any time thereafter as people in the department have
questions or ideas about GIS. Set up a GIS Early Adopters Users Group to get these individuals
together on a monthly basis to share experiences and to relay individuals' questions. (You buy
doughnuts.)
You must also communicate project status reports and announcements of milestones that are
reached. Keep the tone zippy and interesting (here is where your Communications Department
can help). Examples are as follows:
- The XXX District went live with GIS today. District Manager Mr./Ms. YYY stated
that GIS will help to ___. Mr./Ms. ZZZ, customer service representative (field tech,
operations tech, or others) also stated that the AAA application is expected to help
him/her better serve customers by ___ (or something that they could not easily do
without GIS).
- The GIS project Team is scheduled to release a BBB application next Monday that
will help GIS users to ___. District/department application installation and training
schedules and associated user documentation are posted on the GIS Project Website
(http://gisweb/).
Remember that you have to be prepared to deliver bad news as well as good news. Always
inform your project sponsor first and ask her/his opinion on how to handle any negative news.
Remember, all projects have setbacks, it is how these setbacks are handled and communicated
that determine the extent to which the project is impacted.
Confirm that GIS benefits are being attained and look for new benefits (What executives want to hear)
You did do a business case to get project approval, didn't you? Well now you have to deliver
those benefits. A word to the wise: Stick with benefits that can be validated through
measurement (Baker and Roos 1999). It is the job of your company's executives to determine
the strategic value of your project. You will be doing your job if you can demonstrate that you
are delivering the measurable benefits. It is also useful if you can categorize the benefits as
capital or Operations and Maintenance (O&M) since these benefits are treated differently on
financial statements (Baker and Roos 1999).
The term measurable often infers that the data were obtained via stopwatch measurements of
employees' work processes. If you have done this level of data collection for the project
business case then it makes good sense to redo the measurements after GIS has been deployed
in the first group/area. I did have one instance where the individuals whose pre-GIS work
processes were being measured, did a super-human effort that resulted in unrealistic
measurements. The measurements were unrealistic because the level and intensity of the two
individuals' work effort could not be duplicated across the work group and could not even be
sustained by the two individuals themselves. So be careful when using a stopwatch.
There are two other ways of obtaining data. The first way is through the interview process
where you interview employees, ask them to list the major activities, and then ask them to
estimate their workday by percent of time spent on each major activity. If an activity is too
broad, ask the employee to list sub tasks associated with the larger activity. These estimates are
usually quite close to actual stopwatch measurements. The second way to obtain benefit data is
to go to the time-reporting system. This method only works if the time-reporting system gets to
the level of granularity that can be distinctly measured in a post-GIS scenario, and if you and
the corporation believe that the data are correct.
The post-GIS measurements/estimates need to be done using the same methodology that was
used for the pre-GIS measurements/estimates. Hopefully, the results will at least support your
business case (you were conservative weren't you?), and may even best the original
measurements. If you do not have pre-GIS measurements or do not have confidence in the
numbers that were used in the business case, then collect new data, from areas or groups that
were projected to have major GIS benefits but that are not yet using GIS.
