blog.e-LM.com

We presented a session at GOVIS09 last week Thursday. You can view the slides from this session on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/event/govis09

For all the Lord of the Rings fans out there a prequel has just been released and is available for free:

This amazing short film (40 minutes) has been created by a group of fans that came together over the internet. The musical score and visuals are stunning.

For all the Australian Kiwi’s out there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyT-GlBpGO0

We are changing our name from e-LM.com to Psoda, with a completely new website: http://www.psoda.com

Send us some feedback and let us know what you think of the new site.

If you recently signed up for a trial account you can still access it on our old site at https://secure.e-lm.com/login.php.

Morgan Goodchild posted some ideas on how to cut costs for your business by using technology. I’d like to add some to the list:

• Don’t pay for advertising - create a high quality blog instead
• Use SaaS applications instead of high-cost licenses for traditional software applications
• Use electronic filing rather than printed paper
• Use virtualisation to provide “multiple servers”
• Partner with another company to share the costs of office space and infrastructure

Introduction

Benefits Management is used to plan the benefits (or goals) you want to achieve for your organisation, programme, project or sub-project; and to track the progress on achieving those benefits. Benefits management is also known as Benefits Realisation.

Benefits tree

To achieve a particular benefit (or goal) you may need to achieve some intermediary measurements (or sub-benefits) first. Those benefits may themselves have further sub-benefits. This can be represented as a tree of benefits (or a Benefits Map) as illustrated in the image on the above.

Final outcomes

The red circles represent the final outcomes (or benefits) you want to achieve for your organisation.

Intermediate measurements

The pink circles represent the intermediate measurements (or sub-benefits) that you need to achieve to get to the final outcomes.

Initiatives

Initiatives are the activities you undertake to achieve the intermediate or final benefits. These include your programmes, projects and sub-projects.

Assumptions

Many times there are assumptions associated with benefits, or even with initiatives. These assumptions need to be tested regularly to ensure that they still hold true.

e-LM Benefits Management

The following paragraphs describe how benefits management has been implemented in the e-LM system:

Benefit target

A benefit must have a clearly defined target that can be measured. Here are some example targets:

• Reduce costs by 25%
• Increase output by 500 units per month
• Reduce carbon footprint to 20000tonnes CO₂ per annum

Benefit baseline

The benefit baseline is the starting value relative to the target. For the examples above the baseline values may be:

• The starting cost reduction is 0%
• The starting output is 100 units per month
• The starting carbon footprint is 50000tonnes CO₂ per annum

Aggregation

Sometimes it is possible to directly calculate a benefit’s current value based on the values of it’s sub-benefits. This is called aggregation.

There are a number of different ways to aggregate:

Expression

An expression can be used to perform an arbitrary calculation on the values of the sub-benefits to determine the current value for a benefit.

Before you can use an expression you must set a codename for each sub-benefit you want to include in the expression. A codename is similar to a variable name in most programming languages. It must start with either an underscore, a lower-case letter or an upper-case letter. The rest of the codename can contain underscores, letters or numbers.

Below is an example expression:

$a+$b

In this example that are two sub-benefits with codenames “a” and “b”. (Remember to put a $ in front of your codename in the expression.) This expression adds the current values of benefit “a” and benefit “b” together.

Here is a more complex example:

100*($a/$b)

This example calculates the percentage of benefit “a” relative to benefit “b”.

Time charts

e-LM automatically tracks the changes of a benefit over time. These values can then be used to plot a time chart of the benefit as shown below:

(Click on the chart for a full-size view)

Adding benefits

A benefit can be added from the organisation, programme, project or sub-project view pages. You can also add a sub-benefit (or sub-goal) to an existing benefit.

Linking benefits

Benefits can be linked together to form additional networks, for example linking a project-level benefit as a sub-benefit to a programme-level benefit. The linked benefits can then participate in any aggregation calculations.

Benefits should not be linked in a circular network. This could potentially cause an infinite loop. The system will attempt to prevent circular links.

Assumptions

Assumptions can be added as notes to benefits. You can also add a workflow to regularly review these assumptions.

More information

If you would like to find out more about the Benefits Management functionality available in e-LM please feel free to contact us.

On Tuesday, Gartner analysts Carl Claunch and Dave Cearley gave a crowd of IT leaders at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 a list of the top 10 technologies that will provide important strategic advantages to IT over the next three years.

SaaS falls into three of their categories:

2. Cloud computing

4. Web-oriented architectures

5. Enterprise mashups

Full article is available from ZDNet.

We have completed our testing and the search function is now available across your whole programme and project database.

The image below shows an example search result:

The search function allows you to search all of the text fields for all of the items within a specific project, programme or across the whole organisation. The search is of course limited to those items that the user has read access to.

We’ve just launched a search function on our public website. Nothing spectacular about that you might say but we are testing an indexing mechanism that will allow you to search across your whole project database. Watch this space…

In the mean time, give our public search a try and let us know what you think.

Being a business analyst is so much more than just writing up requirements. Craig Brown has put together a list of seven techniques for analysing requirements.

In summary:

• Mandatory and Optional
• Ranking
• Value Analysis
• Requirements Risk Analysis
• Kano Analysis (delighting the customer)
• Stakeholder impact analysis
• PERT Analysis (Sequencing)