What are the best ways to present program benefits to the board?

Make sure to tie the benefits to the business outcomes and everything that leads up to success. Create the connections between how the benefits will ensure success as the business moves towards its roadmap objectives as well as overall organizational mission. Show the percentages, show the savings and where these funds can be re-allocated in other areas that support success. Tell the story and make sure to have the data to back up all claims, as the audience is going to ask the questions, test the theories and help you get better in aligning benefits with the overall goals. It's their job, after all.

The most critical aspect of benefit management is being able to identify a tangible business benefit. In my experience, many companies start by setting the wrong objectives. For example, they may have an objective defined as: implement a new insurance quoting system. That's not an objective. That's a strategy to achieve an objective. The objective should be specific business benefits, such as improving revenue, decreasing costs, increasing quality, increasing NPS, etc. Once these are clearly defined, you can identify the metrics that will move based on your project. In addition, you need to identify all metrics that may be impacted to identify any potential negative results. End-to-end benefit analysis is critical.

When presenting program benefits to the board, using a benefits map can be highly effective. A benefits map visually illustrates how the program aligns with organizational goals and the specific benefits it delivers. Start by clearly defining the objectives and outcomes of the program. Then, map out how each objective translates into tangible benefits for the organization, stakeholders, and end users. Use concise language and visual aids to make the information easily digestible for the board members. By presenting program benefits through a benefits map, you provide a clear and compelling overview of how the program contributes to the organization's success, helping to secure support and buy-in from the board.

A benefits map is an important tool for understanding causation and correlations of your activities to your results. it can be as simple as a graph. However, it's very rare in business to be able to do one thing at a time that impacts a benefit metric. That would take far too much time to sequentially stack improvements to a benefit, such as revenue. Therefore, revenue may be increasing due to multiple parallel changes. A benefit map should be from the perspective of the benefit, not the project. A revenue map would show all of the parallel activities impacting revenue, both positively and negatively, along with timing. This view enables full transparency and dialogue around what appears to be working and what appears to not be working.

For any presentation, I always coach presenters to plan around the Know, Feel, Do model. What do you want your audience to know, how do you want them to feel, and what do you want them to do? I also recommend starting with the headline and being ready with the details as needed. For example, the headline might be "we have successfully increased revenue by....". Then you have a visual that shows this...simple, not fancy. You follow with a little more detail like a simple bullet list of the exact changes. You can paint the picture of the experience you have enabled through examples. But it is very important to not go too deep unless asked with a board-level audience.

En mi experiencia, lo hemos presentado siempre con un breve powerpoint muy enfocado en la audiencia de los ejecutivos, en el lenguaje que ellos hablan, con objetivos concretos y bien definidos, y con foco en el valor de dichos beneficios para la compañía.