To survive in the modern-day, businesses must be consistently identifying opportunities for improvement and implementing the changes required to make it happen. However, all too often plans to implement change fail to deliver the desired benefits. If you have seen change projects in your business lose momentum or fail, then you’ve witnessed how much effort, time, money and opportunity can be lost as a result.
So how can you avoid this? How can you ensure that you are implementing the right changes and improvements for your business? And, how could a project maturity assessment help your business benchmark its data? This article explores the importance of benchmarking data and the benefits it provides.
Common Barriers to Implementing Change
Before changing anything, you must understand the current situation or status. This is one of the core elements of Lean methodology and one of the most commonly overlooked during business improvement regimes. Too often businesses launch into fixing a problem that they don’t fully understand. Businesses are often incorrectly assuming they know the problem and the solution. When this happens, only the symptoms of the problem are addressed, and it often falls short of identifying the root issue at play.
Why Benchmarking Can Help
Benchmarking your data is one of the most important exercises any business can do. It helps identify opportunities and see any problems that may cause issues through a project’s timeline. Benchmarking should, therefore, always form the first stage in any change project. Having a detailed and accurate benchmark of the existing situation ensures that opportunities and solutions are formed based on facts and data, rather than opinion and assumptions.
Benefits of Benchmarking
Having a proper benchmark provides value twofold:
- You’re able to correctly trace issues back to their root cause, whilst simultaneously identifying potential issues and heading them off before they impact the business. This process also allows you to challenge any assumptions held regarding the area of the business you’re looking at and improve understanding.
- The benchmark provides you with a means for comparison throughout, and on completion, of your change project. This enables the demonstration and quantification of value added, which can be critical in securing the necessary approvals and buy-in from stakeholders to get the project across the line (during the change) and to provide confidence in future change projects (once completed).
How LogiKal Can Help
The biggest failures in organisational change can be attributed directly to lack of the above two points and the lack of a suitably accurate benchmark. Not sure where to start? We have created the free and lite PMO Benchmarking Assessment Tool here. Following this, we can carry out an in-depth review of twenty-one core areas of project delivery against industry best practice. A gap analysis can then be carried out to provide improvement recommendations.
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