Benefits Realisation

As further benefits realisation projects get under way I thought it would be useful to share some approaches being used by existing projects, which you may wish to adopt.

Nearly all the projects involve some synthesis and packaging of materials into usable resources for other institutions. These are usually made available via a website or used to support capacity building activities.

As the main goal of benefits realisation activity is to promote take-up by other institutions, the focus is how to support several institutions.

Consultancy Model
The consultancy model has two pre-requisites, existing expertise and capacity in the project team to support other institutions and several institutions who are interested to take-up the project or theme ideas. Institutions are then offered 2-3 days of individual support visits to assist them in piloting the project outcomes in their own institution. An output for the BR project is usually a set of case study exemplars based on the individual institutional experiences. This approach has been used successfully by the Location Independent Working project.

Community Model
This model allows a much larger number of institutions to be engaged, as the approach involves engaging communities of institutions, providing workshops and support at a distance. Existing networks such as subject centres or JISC Services provide established processes for communication activities and routes to engage institutions. You can establish new community of institutions, but you need several interested institutions to get this going. The STEEPLE project has used this approach.

I will be writing some case studies in the next week on existing projects and sharing examples of different approaches to benefits realisation with you in the future.