Earned Benefits, Risks, Standards and Then Some
Interview with Kik Piney
PM Author, Advisor, Expert, Volunteer
Risk Management, Benefits Management, Integrated PPM
South of France
Interviewed by Yasmina Khelifi
International Correspondent, PM World Journal
Paris, France
Introduction to the interviewee
After many years managing international IT projects within large corporations, Crispin (“Kik”) Piney, B.Sc., PgMP decided to work as a freelance project management consultant based in the South of France. At present, his main areas of focus are risk management, and integrated Portfolio, Program and Project management. He has developed advanced training courses on these topics, which he has delivered in English and in French to international audiences from multiple industries.
Kik has served as a volunteer for PMI since year 2000, contributing to most of their foundational standards, from the first Edition of the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3™) right up to the seventh edition of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge in 2020. He was a “significant contributor” to the second edition of both PMI’s Standard for Program Management as well as the Standard for Portfolio Management. He is co-author of PMI’s original Practice Standard for Risk Management. In 2008, he was the first person in France to receive PMI’s PgMP® credential; he was also the first recipient in France of the PfMP® credential. He has presented at a number of recent conferences and published formal papers, many of which are available online.
As a follow-up to his book on Earned Benefit program management that he wrote in 2018, Kik is currently working on developing a complementary handbook on complete benefits realization management that he hopes will help the project community deliver more worthwhile results successfully.
Kik Piney is the author of the book Earned Benefit Program Management, Aligning, Realizing and Sustaining Strategy, published by CRC Press in 2018.
Kik Piney can be contacted at kik@project-benefits.com.
Interview
Q1: First of all, thank you for accepting an interview request from PMWJ. You have written a lot about benefits realization /earned value: could you give us a definition of benefits realization, please?
Crispin Piney (Kik): Yasmina, thank you for inviting me to share my views on a number of topics that I find interesting and challenging. I will attempt to share my enthusiasm with the readers.
I am glad that you put Earned Value and Earned Benefit together in a single question, because it was thinking about Earned Value that led me to develop the theory and framework that I named Earned Benefit.
I was an early advocate of Earned Value and still encourage project teams to use it, but I also realized that its name promises more than it can offer: it does not, in fact, address the value of a project or a program. It only works with budgetary quantities. As such, it would be better – but less attractively – called Earned Budget. Although cost is naturally an important consideration, what the business, the customer and the users actually care about is the benefit that the work has been commissioned to deliver.
Put simply, Earned Value forecasts and tracks what the business has decided to put into a project, whereas Earned Benefit focusses on what they intend to get out of it. Earned Value tracks the spend for the funder and the supplier, whereas the Earned Benefit framework provides the business and the customer with the strategic information they need.
So, to answer your question as to the definition of benefits realization: benefits realization addresses all of the steps required to ensure that a project or a program delivers the planned benefits in a transparent, efficient, and controllable manner. Benefits realization is a bit like Rumpelstiltskin in the children’s story. It takes budgetary straw and spins it into strategic gold.
More…
To read entire interview, click here
How to cite this interview: Khelifi, Y. (2022). Earned Benefits, Risks, Standards and Then Some: Interview with Kik Piney; PM World Journal, Vol. XI, Issue IV, April. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/pmwj116-Apr2022-Khelifi-Interview-with-Kik-Piney.pdf
About the Interviewer
Yasmina Khelifi
Paris, France
Yasmina Khelifi, PMP, PMI- ACP, PMI-PBA is an experienced project manager in the telecom industry. Along with her 20-year career at Orange S.A. (the large French multinational telecommunications corporation), she sharpened her global leadership skills, delivering projects with major manufacturers and SIM makers. Yasmina strives for building collaborative bridges between people to make international projects successful. She relies on three pillars: project management skills, the languages she speaks, and a passion for sharing knowledge.
She is a PMP certification holder since 2013, a PMI- ACP and PMI-PBA certification holder since 2020. She is an active volunteer member at PMI France and PMI UAE, and a member of PMI Germany Chapter. French-native, she can speak German, English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and she is learning Arabic. Yasmina loves sharing her knowledge and experiences at work, in her volunteers’ activities at PMI, and in projectmanagement.com as a regular blogger. She is also the host and co-founder of the podcast Global Leaders Talk with Yasmina Khelifi to help people in becoming better international leaders.
Yasmina can be contacted at https://yasminakhelifi.com/ or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasminakhelifi-pmp-telecom/
Visit her correspondent profile at https://pmworldlibrary.net/yasmina-khelifi/