So-called “soft\" benefits of IT projects include increased agility, flexibility

Question

So-called “soft" benefits of IT projects include increased agility, flexibility, faster time to market, and improvement in employee morale. As projects evolve, some of these benefits become more concrete. How would you track and measure the impact of soft benefits? Discuss soft project benefits and their conversion to measurable top or bottom line benefits.

This is the direction I'm looking toward: To measure soft benefits, the analyst may need to rely on surveys, focus groups, and other, less precise instruments. The important thing is to plan ahead, identify the expected benefits, and put a benefits realization plan in place for measuring them.(http://www.projectconnections.com/knowhow/burning-questions/measuring-intangible-tangible-benefits.html)

Just looking for further development of ideas- I'm new to this subject.

Explanation / Answer

Evaluating intangible benefits relies on informed predictions and secondary comparison, making it a difficult task to perform consistently and accurately. Intangible benefits carry risks and need frequent reevaluatio.

One technique for quantifying intangible benefits is a scenario analysis, which examines the potential outcome of a specific course of action. Business leaders determine the likelihood of achieving each intangible benefit, the assign an estimated value based on the total intangible benefit if a project based on these odds. For example, a business may determine that investing in employee training has only a 10-percent chance of improving customer satisfaction to a given level. This option would therefore be quantifiably less appealing than investing the same amount of money in a new product return policy that has a 50-percent chance of improving customer satisfaction to the same target level.

In some cases, businesses can use the process of elimination to assign quantitative values to intangible benefits after they are achieved, this is done by measuring gains and subtracting the gains that come from tangible benefits, with the difference representing the value of the intangible benefits.

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