Benefits Management and Business Acceptance

Course Description:

This Benefits Management training course has been created for those requiring an understanding of how business benefits are managed to facilitate their delivery. The course includes important contemporary best-practice based, in part, on the Cranford School of Management approach of John Ward and Elizabeth Daniel. The delivery of business benefits also relies on effective testing and implementation of business solutions and the course also covers these areas. Our approach is to underpin theoretical concepts with a realistic case study through which participants can gain experience of applying the benefits management and business acceptance techniques.

The course prepares participants to attain the Certificate in Benefits Management and Business Acceptance offered by the Information Systems Examinations Board (ISEB). participants are required to pass a one-hour open book examination in order to acquire the Certificate.

This course includes the following modules:

Rationale for business success

• Lifecycle for business change
• The role and importance of benefits management
• The role and importance of business acceptance

Drivers for business change

• The mission and strategy of the organisation
• Value propositions
• External environment factors
• Alignment with the business environment

The business case

• Structure and content of the business case
• Categories of business benefit
• Measuring benefits
• Timing for quantifying benefits

Benefits Management and Planning

• Benefit owners
• The Benefits Plan
• Benefits dependencies[BRM1]

User Acceptance Testing - principles and approach

• Principles and vocabulary of testing
• The test process and approaches to testing
• Functional and non-functional testing
• Test documentation

The model office

• The scope of acceptance testing
• Time issues and testing
• Attributes of testing staff

Test design techniques

• Activity Diagrams
• Decision Tables
• State Machine Diagrams

Test planning

• The Test Plan
• Progress monitoring and control
• Incident management
• Confirmation testing
• The Test Summary Report

Reviews and benefits management

• Gateways - scheduled and unscheduled
• Assessing impact - projects, business and environmental

Implementation of business solutions

• Planning the implementation
• Implementation strategies
• Training approaches
• Testing competence

Delivery of business benefits

• Embedding the benefits
• Disaggregating benefits
• Fragmentation of benefits
• Identifying and evaluating further benefits