Businesses do not flourish merely due to a great idea or talent. They grow due to trust and faith that is invested in the idea by the stakeholders – and the sweat and toil of all the team members. Therefore, it is the solemn duty of the executives of organizations irrespective of its size to ensure that they repay this trust in the form of measurable benefits for growing the business.

It is a sad reality though, that across the world, a very large number of businesses of varying sizes end up in failure. Many of these organizations have the best of the executives and strategists, who are educated from the best of the universities the world can offer. Then why do organizations fail?

One can delude himself for failures by offering politically correct explanations like “changing markets”, “external factors”, etc. However, there are significant reasons for dashing the hopes and dreams of millions of employees and causing losses to the investors. The core reason for failure of businesses is that they tend to HOPE to realize benefits rather than PLAN for benefit realization. When the entire business plan is based on hope, there is likely to be a strong dependence on the external environment for the success of the strategy. Higher the dependence on external environment, lower the probability of realizing intended benefits. On the other hand, successful organizations spend their energies to develop the MEANS first before setting their expectations. Their focus is more Inward than Outward. They are thorough with their plans. Their plans are much more realistic, and they channelize all the management activities to ensure that benefits are realized.

Unfortunately, many of the current best practices in Project, Programme and Portfolio management tend to operate in silos. These practices in isolation do not offer a solution to realize the benefits. It is important to shift the paradigm from Activity based Planning or Product based Planning to Benefits based Planning so that entire organization is truly aligned to a common goal and remains devoted to the mission.