Organisations sharpen focus on benefit realisation for key projects

SYDNEY, 13 July 2009 – mbh management (mbh), a Sydney-based consulting and technology company, today announced that it experienced 50 per cent growth in its business for the 2009 financial year, in spite of turbulent economic conditions.
 

mbh’s managing director, Mark Heath, attributed the company’s robust growth to organisations paying much more attention to productivity and squeezing more value out of existing or recently completed projects. “Regardless of the economic cycle, up or down, we believe that organisations should increase their chances of making good investment decisions by ascribing to disciplined benefits management principles. Now, however, we’re seeing a greater focus from clients in comprehensive feasibility studies, business cases and best practices in project management to ensure that their projects are likely to generate tangible value. They are also enthusiastic about technology that can generate productivity improvements and allows them to downsize without losing output," Heath said.
 
Greater benefit realisation with managing by project
mbh is an Australian pioneer in promoting the widespread adoption by organisations of the ‘managing by project’ business management philosophy. This philosophy combines strategic formulation and performance management with investment selection, project and change management to execute on strategy. Key characteristics of the philosophy include evaluating and re-evaluating the portfolio of projects throughout each project lifecycle to ensure full benefits realisation and optimal project selection. It also includes the use of cross-functional teams to support more creativity.
 
“It is scary to consider the number of organisations that have initiated projects without the ability to supervise and manage them to successful completion. For instance, we had a financial services client who had around 200 internal projects with only 300 staff within the organisation available to implement them. The managing director was only vaguely aware of about 5 of these projects,” Heath said.

“The situation was analogous to management just tossing some chicken feed on the ground and then walking away while the staff went about frantically picking and dropping the seeds, with no communication or common purpose. This represents a very expensive problem for organisations of all shapes and sizes,” Heath said.
 
Growth areas
"In addition to assisting companies with project selection and portfolio management, we’ve seen an upsurge in demand for higher productivity, and our enterprise portfolio and project management software offering, UniPhi, which automates the managing by project process, has benefited from this demand,” Heath said.
 
About mbh
mbh is a consulting and technology company that enables organisations to understand, manage and drive benefit realisation for key projects. mbh achieves results by utilising an innovative business management philosophy known as ‘managing by design’, which administers new organisational initiatives like projects and promotes creativity with cross-functional teams and key elements derived from several, interrelated management disciplines.

mbh’s operations consist of a main headquarters in Sydney and another office in Adelaide. mbh is comprised of three core businesses – consulting, training and UniPhi, which is a web-based enterprise portfolio and project management software solution. For additional information on mbh, please visit www.mbh.com.au, and for UniPhi, please visit www.uniphi.com.au.