Corporate planning
Corporate planning support utilising the Investment Management Standard and Benefit Management Framework.
Ideas advisory can support an organisation to develop a corporate plan by using the Investment Management Standard as a basis for ongoing benefit realisation measurement and decision making analysis.
Many organisations that have implemented the Investment Management Standard begin to link many of their core guidance materials to the methodology. This is due to its simple approach for developing ideas quickly and can be quickly integrated into how an organisation plans, delivers and learns from the investments it makes on behalf of the community. It also encourages working collaboratively with its stakeholders to develop best practice frameworks, tools and processes to help embed this approach across the organisation.
A key first step is to develop an updated corporate plan using the Investment Management tools designed to ‘Evaluate a program’. This establishes a shared understanding of why an organisation exists, assesses its current effectiveness and identifies the changes that should be made to become more effective by provides an understanding of whether the outcomes sought by the program of work and investment were actually achieved.
Business context
Government organisations continually develop new mechanisms (agencies), policies and investments that aim to address an existing or emerging unmet need of society.
Implementing these often requires a significant commitment of resources and takes a long time. There is always a risk that the original need has changed, or the original interventions no longer make sense in a changed environment.
This practice validates the ongoing need for the program and its design and, once complete, evaluates its effectiveness.
The knowledge gained in this exercise is then used to inform the development of future strategy.
Benefits of using this practice
Most organisations operate an annual budget cycle where the need for new investment is considered, potential investments are identified, and decisions are made as to how the budget will be spent.
These decisions are sometimes made without the benefit of a clear understanding of the challenges to the organisation or criteria to evaluate competing bids. In the absence of such criteria, investment decisions are often determined by ‘the loudest voices’
Organisations that have used this practice have found it provides a range of benefits including:
- better engagement of senior executives and key stakeholders
- improved articulation of the need for new investment and the establishment of strong prioritisation criteria
- substantial reduction in the number of ‘irrelevant’ investment ideas
- better investment solutions
- time and cost efficiencies
- understanding the logic that formed the foundation of the investment program
- direct or re-direct resources to ensure the policy intent is met
- evaluate the overall effectiveness of a program
- provide new knowledge to those people responsible for delivery.
General approach
There are up to seven workshops / steps involved in this exercise.
- Problem definition
- Benefit definition
- Response definition
- Solution definition
- Investment prioritisation
- Benefit validation (done later when validating success)
- Program effectiveness (done later when validating success)
While the IMS practices were originally used for single investments, they are increasingly being used to establish the logic for investment programs and refocusing and organisation.