Clarity

Benefit plans are limited to financial benefits.  Is there any way to capture other types of planned benefits, e.g., project objectives such as client satisfaction, market share percent increase,  number of branches relocated?

Hi Mark.

    We agree - not all Benefits are currency calculations. Here's our simple approach - I too would love to hear what others do.

   For these projects, we've created two text entry boxes on the project financial summary subpage to capture the Benefit Goal and the current status towards that goal. My customers have named these Value Capture Target and Value Capture Realized (this mirrors the naming convention in their project charter) as shown below - but these can be named anything you need.

   The expectation is that for these projects (Mostly Six Sigma stuff - Process Improvement, Organizational Effectiveness & Efficiency, etc) the PM will update the Value Capture Realized (status towards goal) prior to status reporting and scorecarding publication (we're doing a 2 week cadence for these groups**). This information bubbles out to the scorecards along with other project & status report metrics.

HTH

Great idea, thanks for the suggestions.  We'll need a list of multiple items to track depending on the project, so Dale's approach below sounds closer to what we will need.  Thanks for the quick response.

Mark

Check out the Quality Attributes object out.  As this is a sub-object of the Project Object, you can have a list of 'benefits' per project.  The benefits could be different for different project types or partitions, and use fields like 'Requirement Met' to indicate whether the benefit was realized or not.

You could also have different types of Quality Attributes, where some might be "Benefit," "Customer," "Market Share" or other types, as you define them, one row (record) per benefit, and each record can have several fields (Benefit Type, Benefit Name, Description, Priority, Weighting, Ranking, Target Realization Date....whatever you need to describe/categorize the benefit by).

We've actually turned this object into our 'Checklist' object and created a "Question" sub-object to hang off of it - the summary of the attached questions are used to drive r/y/g stoplights on the Checklist (Quality Attributes) object.

So, the answer is "Yes, there is a way!"  You'll probably need to do some configuration work - and you can go as simple or complex as you want/need to.  The Quality Attributes object might be simple, using out of the box capabilities, if you don't configure anything - or, it can be your most complex solution, too, if you decide to turn it into a Checklist solution, as we have done.

Rob's idea is good, too - if you only need a couple attributes added, having them on the project object makes it real easy to include them in object based portlets.

Don't build in more than you need.  You have a range of solutions to work with, depending on your objectives.

Dale, 

It sounds like this is the type of approach we need.  I will check it out.

Thanks for the quick response!

Makr

Dale,

On investigation, we have no Quality Attributes object.  It doesn't come up by searching for *Quality as an object, either.   (We are on 14.2.)  Is this a custom object in your system?

Hi Mark,

No, this was an out of the box object.  Perhaps they’ve dropped support for it.  If so, you could recreate it.  Ours is heavily configured – will see if I can get a list of out of the box attributes together, if  interested.  Otherwise, the concept is pretty straightforward – create a Quality or “Non-Financial Benefits sub-object, add your attributes, lookups and go.

I’m in a class all day today, so won’t get to this, today.

Dale

Dale,

Thanks for the response.  It sounds really useful.  I'd be interested in seeing how it is set up.

Regards,

Mark