Benefits

Benefits are used to plan the benefits (or goals) you want to achieve for your organisation, programme, project or sub-project and to track the progress on achieving those benefits.

Benefits tree

To achieve a particular benefit (or goal) you may need to achieve some intermediary benefits (or sub-benefits) first. Those benefits may themselves have further sub-benefits. This can be represented as a tree of benefits.

Benefit target

A benefit must have a clearly defined target that can be measured. Here are some example targets:

• Reduce costs by 25%
• Increase output by 500 units per month
• Reduce carbon footprint to 20000 tonnes CO₂ per annum

Benefit baseline

The benefit baseline is the starting value relative to the target. For the examples above the baseline values may be:

• The starting cost reduction is 0%
• The starting output is 100 units per month
• The starting carbon footprint is 50000 tonnes CO₂ per annum

Aggregation

Sometimes it is possible to directly calculate a benefit’s current value based on the values of it’s sub-benefits. This is called aggregation. There are a number of different ways to aggregate:

Aggregation	Description
None	No aggregation, i.e. this benefit’s current value is entered manually
Count	Count the number of sub-benefits
Sum	Sum together the current values of all the sub-benefits
Average	Calculate the average of the current values of all the sub-benefits
Minimum	Calculate the minimum of the current values of all the sub-benefits
Maximum	Calculate the maximum of the current values of all the sub-benefits
Multiply	Multiply together the current values of all the sub-benefits
Expression	Use an expression to calculate this benefit\’s current value based on the values of it\’s sub-benefits.

Expression

An expression can be used to perform an arbitrary calculation on the values of the sub-benefits to determine the current value for a benefit. Before you can use an expression you must set a codename for each sub-benefit you want to include in the expression. A codename is similar to a variable name in most programming languages. It must start with either an underscore, a lower-case letter or an upper-case letter. The rest of the codename can contain underscores Below is an example expression: $a+$b In this example that are two sub-benefits with codenames “a” and “b”. (Remember to put a $ in front of your codename in the expression.) This expression adds the current values of benefit “a” and benefit “b” together. Here is a more complex example: 100*($a/$b) This example calculates the percentage of benefit “a” relative to benefit “b”.

Adding benefits

A benefit can be added from the organisation, programme, project or sub-project view pages. You can also add a sub-benefit (or sub-goal) to an existing benefit.

Linking benefits

Benefits can be linked together to form additional networks, for example linking a project-level benefit as a sub-benefit to a programme-level benefit. The linked benefits can then participate in any aggregation calculations. Benefits should not be linked in a circular network. This could potentially cause an infinite loop. The system will attempt to prevent circular links.