Hostile Benefits Analysis

One of the stranger usages of benefits analysis that I have been involved in has been in creating benefit maps from documentation to show that a target project will not work, helping to built the business case for a different project.

This sounds like a fairly unpleasant or unnecessary task, however lets think for a second about how spending decisions / bids are decided.  These are frequently competitive processes where there is a limited pot of resources to be spread between many good and well argued ideas.  If the documentation for each bid / project can be obtained then it is a "fairly" quick and simple process to break that documentation down into a benefits map.

The interesting thing here is that you have a benefits map based off of the project / bid documentation that is usually full of holes where assumptions come into play.  Frequently there are listed benefits with no initiatives to make them happen, or assumptions that doing something will achieve a goal that is unrealistic.

Of course what should be done at this point is to take the map to the stakeholders and bash it into shape in a workshop, however it is also possible to simply hand the map to the decision maker.  Each of the problems in the map can be justified from the project / bid documentation, and because of this evidencing process the map can be utterly damning.

A defence against this is of course to fix your documents when you have completed the stakeholder workshop section of document deconstruction, as if you haven't you may see your documents mapped for you...