Measuring actual project benefits - How to maintain your project profile and funding

Measuring actual project benefits - How to maintain your project profile and funding

Dean Zastava
Convergent Group
6399 South Fiddler's Green Circle, Suite 600
Englewood, CO 80111

Your project is approved, don't relax - initiate a plan to maintain your project profile
Congratulations, you've fought the big budget battle and have won. Your project is approved! Now you should be able to put away your sales persona, close the door to your office, and focus solely on project implementation, right? Wrong! You did win the budget battles against the new Customer Information System (CIS), the new Call/Customer Care Center, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the Y2K PCs, the new fleet vehicles, etc. But new initiatives are already winning your executives' mindshare. Of course, the Internet, and e-business are on the playing field, but so are other emerging initiatives such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The longer the elapsed time until your next executive discussion or presentation, the smaller the size of the executive mindshare your project will command. A project with small executive mindshare translates directly into lack of understanding (read support) and requests to reduce the project budget.

To keep your GIS project on the playing field, you must keep selling, selling, and selling. Selling refers to educating and communicating. GIS project implementation time frames have been dramatically reduced to half or less than half of the time required just two or three years ago. The good news is that this fact helped you to sell your project in the first place. The bad news is that competition continues to demand ever-decreasing implementation time frames and ever increasing benefits. In addition, new initiatives being considered in your company's executive suite are taking aim at some of the benefits that you claimed in your project's business case. If you do not continually defend (sell) your project, you risk being perceived as not meeting your stated objectives - a potentially career-limiting situation.

To prevent any perception that you have not met your objectives, take the following steps:

Communicate your project charter and project status.
Confirm that GIS benefits are being attained and look for new benefits.
Develop new corporate initiatives and explain how your GIS project can benefit from these initiatives.

Think of the above steps as opportunities to continue to sell your project. As used in this paper, the term "sell" means educate and communicate. You need to take every opportunity to sell your project, even at the risk of repeating yourself on a regular basis. You know and understand the importance and the promise of GIS to your company because you are immersed in it every day. Outside of your project team, other people in the organization only know about GIS from what they hear from you and your team. They do not have the emotional or career investment to want to chase you for information. Therefore, you must be unrelenting in selling your project. Your plan to maintain the profile of your project must include all levels of the organization.

Communicate Project Charter and Project Status
From the lessons-learned archives of GITA, the key ingredient of project communications is an active executive sponsor. If you don't have one, get one, and the higher up your sponsor is on the organization chart the better. If the one you have is not actively bearing the GIS project torch, you need to schedule an appointment to discuss your concerns and ask for assistance. A project like GIS that can positively impact areas across the entire organization is a once-in-acareer opportunity, but it requires taking care of the project implementation and a continuous selling effort.

Executives are gauged (paid) by their ability to lead organizations to perform more effectively, and thus lower the cost of doing business, as well as for their ability to increase revenues (grow the business through new revenue producing services or mergers and acquisitions). The result of lower costs and increased revenues is higher shareholder return for corporations, and increased services without increased taxes for governments. GIS can help achieve both of these, but the executives need to be educated as to how and when. And they need to be updated on a regular basis.

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.

collected using a stopwatch. The estimated activities are averages based upon estimates from multiple key individuals, or in the case of plotting are an average of several different types of maps. Note that actual plotting of maps actually takes longer than retrieving a mylar original and running a blue line copy. However, with planning, the GIS users can do their plotting over night in batch mode or they can go onto other activities while their specific map is plotting. The expectation is that after a few months, the users will no longer regularly plot entire maps or the aerial photo image background to take into the field. They will instead plot only the area(s) of interest and will send these plot to a laser printer, which is much faster.

Table 1 illustrates what your executives want to see regarding measurable benefits. Other benefit areas to be tracked and reported upon are in the Operating and Maintenance (O&M) side of the budget and may include the reduction in mainframe cycle costs associated with the GIS replacement of legacy mainframe systems.

Table 1. Measurable benefits plotting.

New corporate initiatives and how your GIS project can benefit form these iniatives
Remember the previous discussion in section one about your project sponsor and the need to meet with this individual regularly? One of the objectives of these meetings is to determine what other initiatives are being considered, or have been approved for implementation. These initiatives can either be a bane or a boon to your GIS project, because it is very likely that these initiatives have identified part of the same piece of the benefit pie as GIS. If you take the ostrich approach and ignore the new initiative, you may lose some of your benefits and you most certainly have lost an opportunity to sell the value of your project.

Listen carefully to what your executive sponsor has to say about new initiatives, and look for opportunities for GIS to extend the benefits of any new initiative. Do not make any rash statements, but rather indicate that there may be some synergy between the new initiative and GIS, and that you want to look into it further. Then, do you homework, including meetings with the project team responsible for the new initiative. If the project team responsible for the new initiative doesn't have a good grasp on the GIS project or GIS functionality, arrange for followup meetings and demonstrations. Share information about the GIS project business case, including benefits. Try to identify concrete advantages of working together and suggest a combined presentation to the respective executive sponsors.

A recent example (of GIS leveraging another initiative) is a utility company that has embarked upon an Enterprise GIS implementation. A separate initiative was approved to build a project estimating application to replace a non-Y2K mainframe application. During discussions between the two project teams it was discovered that the GIS project had identified a need to have a repository for compatible units to support a graphical work design application. The project estimating team had built a compatible-units database that was already in final test stages. Both GIS and project estimating were using Oracle 8.05, and GIS was able to leverage the work done by the project estimating team thereby reducing the cost of the GIS graphical work design application. The compatible units database is now common to both projects, which also eliminates redundancy and reduces O&M costs.

Sometimes the benefits of leveraging other initiatives or using GIS to extend other initiatives are not easily seen or understood by others. Be patient, but be persistent.

Conclusion
Companies and governments are exponentially more dynamic today than they were just two years ago. Two years ago they were talking about change, today they are implementing change and then changing before they complete the previous plan. This dynamic state is very challenging to work in. Executives are multitasking like never before to identify which initiatives will give their organizations the competitive advantage. Selling your project (executive sponsorship, continuing education and communication, and benefits validation and expansion) are the keys to success and continued project funding. If done well, the result is often very positive to a GIS project manager's career.

References
Baker J. and Roos D., 1999. Cost-Benefit Analysis Essential To IT Projects, GITA 2000 proceedings.