Programs: It's All About the Benefits
Benefits management for program management professionals
I have experienced back pain since my early twenties, when I learned that a full-time desk job is a bad life plan. This chronic injury is a curse, but it gets me to the gym more often than I would by motivation alone. As building muscle is the key to alleviating back pain, I engage in fairly serious strength training. I run miles, jump rope, lunge, box jump, kip swing, and try with futility to do a pull-up. It’s excruciating. It’s often silly. Whether I like it or not, I exercise hard every week because that’s just what I do now.
To my benefit, my back does feel better. Larger muscles have emerged, however slowly, and while I’m not pain-free, my spine no longer feels like a twig about to snap. My gym mates are wonderful as well. We chatter happily about inane topics and cheer each other on while doing dumbbell push presses and farmer carries. I also know deep inside my body is preparing to carry me through a longer, fuller life. Healing, camaraderie, and long-term wellness: the benefits of exercise are vast.
But what have I actually “produced” with all this exercise? Arguably not much.
I’ve run miles yet journeyed nowhere. I’ve lifted weights, yet created no new instrument or product. While our ancestors labored to put food on the table, I spin on a stationary bike to burn off that once-coveted energy.
My experience exercising broadcasts that difference between an output and a benefit. Each time I go to exercise (i.e., a project), I put a lot of energy and focus into physical labor that doesn’t necessarily produce much (a bit more muscle, but mostly just a sweaty, stinky person). However, when all my exercising is combined (i.e., the program), the benefits are enormous, as I become a healthier, happier person, more capable of tackling other challenges in my life.
What are “Benefits” in program management?
I hope this example of extremely low output yielding significant benefits illustrates the distinction between the two concepts of output and benefits. As a program management professional (PgMP), understanding these differences is fundamental to navigating between projects and programs. Specifically:
Projects are about outputs or deliverables. You run a project to create something new, such as a product, service, or piece of knowledge. But unlike my exercise, projects hopefully produce a large number of highly valuable outputs.
Programs are about tying those outputs together into bigger, compounded benefits. In my personal case, I am a healthier person, which consequently makes me more productive in other aspects of my life. It also statistically reduces my lifetime healthcare costs, which is beneficial for society as a whole. For a non-profit program, benefits are about a) making a personal impact that improves an individual’s life and b) curbing an underlying problem at the population level to improve society at large.
Example: Breaktime
To illustrate benefits at a non-profit program, I will put a spotlight on an organization called “Breaktime,” a non-profit based in Boston that works to solve young adult homelessness. For transparency, I have no affiliation or relationship with this organization; I chose it as an example because of its excellent website, which clearly communicates Breaktime’s purpose and its program. Specifically:
Goal: “Breaking the cycle of young adult homelessness.”
Projects: They have a program model where youth facing housing insecurity go through phases called “Launchpad,” “Liftoff,” and “Stable Orbit”. Each phase (i.e., project) is an incremental progression of job and life skills training, combined with work experience and wrap-around services (e.g., healthcare). The progression of these projects forms the program.
Outputs: At each phase, a vulnerable youth gains more sophisticated job skills, builds their finances, establishes a work history, and finds a stable living situation - to name a few.
Benefits: The program provides individuals with the tools and resources necessary to lead stable, prosperous lives independently and avoid homelessness over the long haul. Societally, we all benefit from a reduction in young adult homelessness, and the city grows stronger.
Breaktime uses projects that create outputs that accumulate into larger benefits, one that impacts specific people and society as a whole. It’s impressive and an exemplar for how non-profits utilize project and program management to meet their missions.
How do PgMPs manage benefits?
As a program management professional, we are the people who bring this formula to life. One of our key responsibilities is to manage benefits, and it’s challenging work.
In the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) Standard for Program Management, benefits management is recognized as the second of the six performance domains (1 p.80-96). PMI helpfully breaks down the work into approachable activities. In short summation:
Benefit Identification: The creation of a list or “Benefits Register” of all the intended benefits expected by the program. You often compile the ideas from across your stakeholders to verbalize the benefits.
Benefits Analysis and Planning: The establishment of the rules of the road for how you will monitor the creation of benefits. This phase involves determining how to measure the benefits and their expected delivery timeline. All this information is then compiled into a “Benefits Management Plan.”
Benefits Delivery: Utilizing your “Benefits Management Plan”, you track the delivery of the intended benefits and, of course, adjust as your program evolves with new knowledge, setbacks, and influences. The hope is that your identified benefits should change very little over time, but the means and potentially the timeline in which they arrive shift as the program evolves. You’re on point for understanding, synthesizing, and communicating those fluctuations.
Benefits Transition: As your program reaches a hopefully successful conclusion, it’s ready to be integrated into operations or established as a standing service (i.e., frontline program*). You are then identifying all the activities and discussions needed to ensure a seamless transition of the program and it’s corresponding benefits to the new owner.
Benefits Sustainment: Before officially closing out the program, you create a “Benefits Sustainment Plan” with the necessary information to ensure the new owners can maintain and successfully track the realization of benefits going forward.
*PMI focuses programs on work that is done internally at an organization, such as improving underlying operations. The end goal of these programs is to be integrated into standing operations eventually. At non-profits, I’ve observed that many revenue-generating services (i.e. operations) are often defined as programs. For example, the aquatics program at the YMCA. I like to cover both these backline and frontline programs, as they require similar activities from the overseeing program management professional.
The key challenge of managing benefits
In my experience with non-profits, the key challenge in benefit management is effective measurement. As non-profits often aim to address large societal issues, it’s hard to prove causality (i.e., that our actions are the cause of an improvement and not some other external factor). Using Breaktime as our example again, the seemingly obvious measure is to count the number of youth living with housing insecurity and then judge the program’s success by whether that number increases or decreases. First, that measure is likely tough to get, as we can’t exactly ask every youth around Boston if their housing is secure or not. Second, with federal benefits decreasing and deportations destabilizing households, many factors could increase the number of homeless youth in the next several years that are well out of Breaktime’s control. The measure is certainly worth watching, but it can’t be how Breaktime assesses its benefits, nor indeed how it judges its own success.
I don’t have any direct insight into how Breaktime measures its benefits. If I were their PgMP, I would look for measures that are specific to the program outputs, such as the number of people who complete the program, as well as long-term housing and job retention rates among participants. While a proxy to the greater goal (the end of youth homelessness), this information signals that the intended benefits are materializing. Proxy measures are one method by which nonprofits address the challenge of measuring their benefits.
“Deep Clear Water”
In my experience, non-profits excel at articulating their benefits and using them as motivators for their work. Yet, we are still learning how to mindfully manage those benefits across projects to ensure they’re actually happening in the way we are expecting. That’s the job of a program management professional, and truthfully, one of the most challenging aspects of the job.
In future articles, I look forward to diving deeper into Benefits Management and specifically exploring how to measure benefits effectively at non-profit organizations. Until then, please enjoy this week’s song pairing: “Deep Clear Water” by Gryffin and GRiZ. Benefits, like water, are immersive and not necessarily in your control. I find the song perfectly captures that state of being.
References
Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.