MGMT 620 Week 4 DB Forum 2 Example

Discussion Board Forum 2: Thread and Two Replies

MGMT 620 Project Evaluation & Assessment, Discussion Board Forum 2 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the transit project and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Thomas's text, the peer-reviewed studies and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 620.

Thread

At our transit agency's board meeting last March, a commissioner asked a simple question: had the real-time bus arrival app raised ridership, as the business case had promised? The room went quiet. The app had launched on time in early 2024 and under its $1.1 million budget, it had been installed on 61,000 phones, and its crash rate was below one percent. The project team had reported all of that at closeout and then returned to other work. The business case, however, had justified the app by a 3 percent increase in weekday ridership within a year, on the theory that riders who knew when the bus was coming would wait for it instead of driving. No one had been assigned to measure that.

The gap between delivered outputs and promised benefits is the subject of a growing body of research. Serra and Kunc (2015) drew survey responses from project practitioners on three continents and reported that benefits realization management practices were positive predictors of project success in creating strategic value for the business. Badewi (2016) went further, studying project management and benefits management practices together and arguing that the two should be governed as a pair, since project management alone does not ensure that benefits are realized. In both studies, a recurring element is ownership: someone in the operating organization, not the project team, accountable for the benefit after handover. Our agency had a project manager but no benefit owner. The service planning department, which designs routes and schedules and would have been the natural owner, was never asked to accept the ridership target, and its managers told me later that they had assumed the project team was tracking it.

The research is not uncritical. Breese (2012) cautioned that benefits realization can become a mechanical exercise that produces paperwork rather than insight, and that its claims of effectiveness rest on limited evidence. That warning matters for a public agency, where a new benefits process could easily become one more report. A proportionate response would be simple: name the service planning manager as owner of the ridership benefit, choose three measures, and compare the routes with high app use against similar routes with low use. Thomas (2015) treats evaluation as continuing after closeout, and this comparison is the kind of evaluation that would tell the board whether the app did what it was bought to do.

When we finally ran the comparison in May, weekday ridership on the eight highest-use routes had grown 1.8 percent more than on comparable routes. That is less than promised, but it is real, and it gives the agency something to build on. It also showed where the app was failing: on two routes with frequent detours, the arrival times were wrong often enough that riders stopped trusting them. Those routes are now the first priority for the app's next release, a decision the agency could not have made without measuring the benefit route by route.

A proverb tells the owner of livestock to know how each flock and herd is faring, since wealth does not keep itself (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 27:23-24). An owner who never looks at the flock cannot know whether the investment in it is paying. For a public agency spending riders' fares and taxpayers' money, measuring benefits is part of faithful stewardship.

Classmates: on your projects, who owns a benefit after the project team goes home?

Reply to Julia

Julia, your thread on the call center consolidation at your insurance company described a performance dashboard with 34 indicators reported weekly to the steering committee. You argued that more measurement had made the project more accountable.

I wonder whether the 34 indicators measured the same thing. From your description, most tracked activity, calls handled, staff trained and systems migrated, while the business case's benefits, lower cost per call and higher first-call resolution, appeared only twice. Badewi (2016) argues that project management and benefits management are separate practices that must be governed together; a dashboard full of project activity can look accountable while the benefits go untracked. Thomas (2015) recommends designing evaluation around the questions the organization actually needs answered, which might mean fewer indicators, chosen because each would change a decision.

A proverb links careful, diligent planning with plenty and haste with want (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 21:5). Diligence in measurement may mean choosing carefully rather than counting everything. A shorter dashboard would also give the committee time to discuss each measure instead of scanning a page of green and amber cells. Which three of the 34 indicators would your steering committee keep if it could keep only three, and do any of them measure cost per call?

Reply to Ethan

Ethan, your thread on the new distribution center your company built outside Memphis raised something my own thread missed: the building was finished, the conveyor system worked, and yet no one in operations had agreed to the throughput target in the business case. The project team set it; operations inherited it.

Serra and Kunc (2015) found that benefits realization practices, including assigning benefit owners, predicted project success in delivering strategic value. Your case suggests why: a target that the operating managers never accepted is a target no one will manage toward. Thomas (2015) describes evaluation as something planned at the start of a project, which would have brought operations into the conversation before construction began.

Breese (2012) would caution against adding a heavy process. A single meeting at which the operations director signs off on the throughput target, and agrees to report it quarterly for two years, might be enough. It would turn a number in a business case into a commitment someone owns, and it would give the next project team a reason to ask operations for its targets before design begins rather than after the ribbon is cut. Has the operations director at your center seen the original throughput target, and would they consider it realistic?

References

Badewi, A. (2016). The impact of project management (PM) and benefits management (BM) practices on project success: Towards developing a project benefits governance framework. International Journal of Project Management, 34(4), 761-778. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2015.05.005

Breese, R. (2012). Benefits realisation management: Panacea or false dawn? International Journal of Project Management, 30(3), 341-351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2011.08.007

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Serra, C. E. M., & Kunc, M. (2015). Benefits realisation management and its influence on project success and on the execution of business strategies. International Journal of Project Management, 33(1), 53-66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2014.03.011

Thomas, W. H. (2015). The basics of project evaluation and lessons learned (2nd ed.). CRC Press.