As an IT project manager, I searched for an easy and generic approach to detect the reasons (whether financial, operational, cultural, …), as well to define the goals and the measurements needed to monitor the business case!

Although not a new concept, I believe that the “gains and pains”-concept – often used for defining value proposition – may be used as “a framework” that helps the writer of a business case to describe the reasons together with its goals for starting up a project

Putting theory into practice, I give an example from one of my customers, that  briefly describes how a “pain” was translated into a solution and how the goals were defined for that specific solution

First we discussed which pains my customer had. Soon it became very clear that involvement of people was a major pain, this due to historical reasons and the culture spread. From a technology perspective, we tried to help the customer in finding a solution to help the customer’s employees improving their involvement within their professional environment. The assumption was that employees could easily use any external social collaboration platform to spread their ideas about the company publicly.  Therefor a private social collaboration platform was introduced, allowing ALL employees to facilitate horizontal and bottom-up communication.

As a result, employees got more and more involved into the company processes, as they were able to express their thoughts about almost any process in the company,. The platform allowed upper management to capture their employees’ thoughts and comments as an input for improving processes and circumstances. Measuring involvement became easy: the more people who shared their ideas on the private social collaboration platform, the better processes were adapted and the better these processes were perceived by the employees.

This is what happened mathematically. By defining a pain, the company got a gain at the same price of one pain!

• Pain:  Lack of involvement
• Goal:  Improve involvement of employees and indirectly improve processes
• Gain:  Improved processes
• How:   A private social collaboration tool and capturing the ideas of employees about internal processes
• KPI and Measurements:  Counting the number of input and measuring the effect of adapted processes onto the employees via a simple tool called “Survey”!

Of course, we all agree that most business cases consist of multiple pains and gains, having each their own goals and measurement tools.

Hopefully this simple example may help other people in defining a business case.

Sometimes by making the wrong decision on which project methodology or approach to be used.

What’s in for the customer?

Before starting up any project, one another should ask himself the question what the customer exactly wants:

• A predictable budget?
• A predictable scope?
• A predictable planning?
• Predictable deliverables, documentation, etc …
• Does the customer want an indication of the project cost and how detailed should it be (read unclear scope?)

In most cases, if the answer is “yes” to one of the above questions, it is more than recommended to define the exact scope of a solution. By means of the envision-phase, you should be able to provide the customer with necessary details of his project cost and expected project deliverables, by listing up his needs on a high-level scale. These needs should enable any provider to determine the high-level scope of the solution, as well as any other services which may be required within a project.

In addition, the envision phase should lead to a business case, providing the customer insights on the gains and the pains of a project. This strategic advantage will help the customer on making the right choices on which deliverables to be included in the scope. Therefore the envision phase should assure customer value: in some cases the business case may lead to the conclusion that some of the deliverables should or should not be executed in order to fulfill the customer’s needs. Clearly this will avoid overhead in f.ex. analysing or developing deliverables which do not contribute to any of the customer gains, as defined in the business case.

What’s in for the project team?

By defining a clear scope, expectations and budget following advantages should be taken in consideration:

• easier planning of deliverables
• shorter analysis phase (high-level scope & requirements are already defined)
• easier follow-up on the budget
• transparent change management (scope is already clearly defined)
• aligned expectations between customer and supplier about deliverables
• …

Admittedly, if not confronted with this subject, most people are having difficulties in quantifying the value part.  In this small blog I briefly tried to summarize the answer to 2 questions:

• What does Customer Value mean for my customer?
• How can I measure (as a supplier) if the value I’m delivering to my customers, meets their expectations?

Before answering these question, it is almost imperative to know how customer value is defined.
I strongly believe that different perceptions of customer value end up in a restricted vision, whereby most of the suppliers believe that Customer Value should reflect a pricing model for the delivery of services and/or products.

Primarily trying to compare themselves to other competitors, should we consider this to be customer value; A product at a fair price?

To answer this, let me start by telling a little story about myself:

I used to buy my bread at a local bakery. They sold it at 2,10 €. Satisfied with this price/quality ratio, I kept on buying my bread on a daily base in the same store against the extra effort of a 3-minute drive.

Until I discovered another bakery, only 7 minutes further away. They told me their bread costed €2,8, which sounded quite expensive to me, especially when comparing to the other bakery.  Nevertheless I decided to give it a try. Surprisingly their bread tasted a lot better and I experienced that I could keep my bread for 3 days, without (or almost) losing any of its freshness. A simple calculation reveals that this expensive bread costed me less than before, as nothing got wasted and I bought less breads.

As you may conclude for yourselves, these days my bread is more expensive than before, but my benefit grew evenly.

The reason I tend to believe that customer value can be translated into one simple formula: Customer Value = Benefits – Costs. Referring to my little story above, the value proportion grew at the expense of increased costs.

As a side note, but not less important to me, I also noticed that, these days, a lot of people (customers and suppliers)  do not invest (enough) time in analyzing or overthinking the benefit of their expenses anymore, reducing the real value they could obtain or deliver.

Although this simple formula may be used for measuring a customer’s benefit, how does this reflect to the supplier? Which parameters indicate that a supplier is delivering customer value?

From a short term vision to a long term vision:

As a supplier, I might have a good feeling when I’ve sold a lot of services/products to my customer in the past year. Does this indicate that my customers received a lot of value (Or was I able to convince them once to buy my products/services?)?
The probable answer lies in the second question: no, of course not.

In my humble attempt to explain what customer value means, I came to a conclusion on how a vendor/supplier might conclude whether he is delivering value to his customers. Again, the answer lies in 2 words :  long-term relationship and customer loyalty.

But again, is this something measurable? I do believe so, by asking myself following questions:

• Are my customers recurring customers?
• Does my customer gain information on a frequent base? (even without buying)
• Did my existing customers recommend me to new customers?
• Do I have an open relationship with my customer?
• Was I able to cross-sell to existing customers?

Although my opinion does not take into account all aspects of customer value, I hope that some of the people out there at least recognize some of my statements.

It has never been my intention to convince people on this subject, rather I hope to start up a discussion on how customer value is being perceived all over the globe!.

Feel free to react.