Value to whom?
Abstract
The purpose of a project is to create value balancing risks and rewards [1], but value for whom? It is necessary to understand which are the main stakeholders by underlining the importance of customers and of those who are defined end users, presenting also the strategies of communication that should be maintained with all these actors. The project benefits management plan, which is an additional document to the project charter and the project management plan, describes how to bring benefits and how to monitor them subsequently. A benefit delivers value, which can be tangible or intangible, to the organization and to people impacted by the project. Each organization, thanks to Program Management aims to increase its ability to transfer its benefits to society, consumers and users. Benefits are presented differently depending on whether a non-commercial organization (social value) or a commercial organization (business value) is considered. In the case of Portfolio Management there is a section completely dedicated to value management, to the descriptions of its components and the tasks which should be performed by the portfolio manager: from the negotiation of the expected value to final report value.[2] Finally in the article, the Agile approach will be considered and how this allows users to help increasing the value for themselves and for the company. In this way the needs and desires of the consumer are met in the best possible way; in fact consumers are one of the four fundamental pillars of the Agile manifesto. The big difference between predictive projects and agile projects is that, in the latter case, the value is delivered to consumers throughout the implementation of the agile project, not only at the end as can happen for example applying the Kanban approach (part of Lean Thinking) that focuses solely on the final value brought to the consumer. The value then flows very quickly and optimized to the end user who is the main reason why the project team and the leaders act in one way rather than another.
