Tackling the Challenges of Moving from the Business Case to a Program Plan

Professional Development Workshop

Earn 6 PDUs

Includes Lunch and Refreshments

Hosted by: Vancouver Island Chapter of PMI

This session will help BAs and Project Managers deal with the chaos, confusion, and fallacies which are commonly faced when turning the company strategic vision into a tactical implementation plan.  Often a business case is developed to justify the vision and its associated value to the business.  But the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental (PESTLE) factors often cloud the real attainability of the benefits and provide a challenge to create a feasible plan.  There are many different biases that skew business cases that BAs and Project Managers need to understand and factor into true project/program deliverables.

This full day workshop will provide a background based on the APGM Benefits Realization strategy and will walk through a simulation of a business case to arrive at the development of a benefit map for the business case.  The workshop will cover various analysis techniques and suggest which one to use at which time in the lifecycle.   Most importantly, it will cover methods and approaches (soft skills) for the project manager to challenge the stakeholders and sponsors to adjust PESTLE expectations into a realistic plan.  This workshop will focus on a “Start With The End in Mind” approach and explore the real-life constraints that challenge the BA and Project Manager.

Participants will be able to identify the cognitive biases that impact the forecasting of benefits and how  to reduce their impact on Benefits Realization.  Among the biases covered are: 1) the illusion of control, 2) the status quo bias, 3) the sunk cost effect,  4) confirmation bias, 5) framing,  6) mental accounting , 7) groupthink, and 8) the planning fallacy.

Participants will develop a Strategy to Benefits Map that provides a clear line-of-sight from the end benefits, and their associated KPI, measurement criteria, and dis-benefits.  This exercise will include extracting critical data from a business case and discounting various biases that might lead to exaggerated numbers.

Participants will understand the various appraisal methods to use in the Benefits Management Cycle including Cost Benefit Analysis, Cost Effectiveness Analysis, Real Options Analysis, and Multi-criteria Analysis.

This session will look at the winning combination of soft skills and hard skills needed to take a business case to achievable project outcomes.

Register now!