Your perspective and beliefs determine what you see and the significance you assign.
If you’re standing in the middle of a city you’ll have a different perspective to someone standing on the top of a hill overlooking the city. If you believe that ‘you craft your own destiny’ you will have a different view on welfare to someone who believes that it’s our role to ‘help others’.
The same city or the same welfare will be viewed differently and assessed differently.
Different perspectives lead to different actions
The same point applies with project and value delivery perspectives and associated beliefs.
To illustrate:
From a project delivery perspective, time and cost are management controls. Being ‘over time or over budget’ is seen as an estimating error, a productivity problem or as a (lack of) management control issue.
From a value delivery perspective, time and cost are value determinants. Being ‘over time or over budget’ is seen as a cause of value loss – reducing the net value realizable or losing out on the benefits for the duration of the time overrun.
Same issue – over time or over budget – but very different interpretations and assessments of their significance and impact. Project delivery looks at the project causal failure, value delivery looks at resultant business value loss.
Value delivery is fundamentally different to project delivery
This simple example illustrates that value delivery is not achieved by just adding a few extra ‘benefits management’ processes to a project delivery process, but is a different perspective and belief system that permeates the whole end-to-end delivery process.
Value delivery is not a matter of a few extra steps or questions but a different ecosystem and belief system.
This is why so many benefits management processes that are added to existing project delivery processes fail. This approach fails to address the underlying fundamentally different perspectives.
