Benefits Management
Dr Arnoud Franken
Steve Macaulay
Managers are constantly needing to keep abreast of whether their
investments are good value. Now one approach is one called Benefits
Management. Now to explore this issue is Arnoud Franken. Now Arnoud,
how do you ensure that companies get good value for their investments?
Arnoud Franken
Let’s start by looking at what value is. Essentially value is that what’s being
valued by important stakeholders for example your customers or your
employees. Now you can express value in monetary terms but it doesn’t
have to be. It can also be something intangible like for example a better
customer experience or shorter response time. Now to create this value it’s
typically that the people who provide it have to work in a different or a
better way. But they are not going to do that simply because you tell them
to or want them to or because you’ve invested in some promising new
technology. Reason alone doesn’t inspire and then of course no-one likes
change forced upon them, so if you want to create value from your
investments you have to start by inspiring people.
Steve Macaulay
So instead of, if you like, an accountants approach, you’re taking a very
stakeholder and people orientated approach. Now I guess that has got some
implications, you’ve got to really listen to those people and you’ve got to
engage with them, you’ve got to take on board what they are saying.
Arnoud Franken
Exactly, and that’s for two reasons. The first reason is that the reason for
change may be clear to you as a change leader but that doesn’t mean that
it’s also clear for others. So you have to start by investing time and effort in
order to develop a shared understanding and a common purpose, and
second, what motivates you doesn’t necessarily motivate someone else so
again, in order to gain buy-in and commitment from your key stakeholders
you have to involve them early on so they can see from the very beginning
what the benefits of the investment are going to be for them.
Steve Macaulay
Now early on we talked about Benefits Management, now how does that
link in then with the idea of listening, involving and so on?
Arnoud Franken
Well as soon as you have the shared understanding and common purpose
and the people can see what the benefits are going to be for them, what
they will then be willing to do is contribute their knowledge and insights and
their ideas in order to make it happen. Now as you say we have these
benefits management approach and we can help change leaders facilitate
this whole process and essentially what the approach does is it allows
people to visually connect what the change is about with what it means for
them personally, both from a benefits point of view and a change point of
view. And it tends to be that when you have this visual representation of the
change it tends to be that the change is implemented much faster and often
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also much more successfully.
Steve Macaulay
So if you were to sum up then the essence of getting value out of
investments and benefits management, what would it be?
Arnoud Franken
It’s first of all, remember that value doesn’t necessarily have to be anything
in monetary terms it can be something else. Inspire people, because reason
alone doesn’t work and thirdly involve people from early on.
Steve Macaulay
Three key messages, thank you Arnoud.
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