Success is never found; it is created. With this in mind, what is the greatest challenge for executive decision makers in creating optimum conditions to achieve success in law enforcement? In the United States, instead of reinventing the wheel, leaders need to look at what other police agencies around the globe have done when facing similar circumstances. One example comes from the United Kingdom policing and a challenging but familiar situation they went through before “defund the police” ever became a common phrase in the United States.

Isn’t success simply a case of achieving project goals within a specified time and cost? But if so, what factors contribute to a successful project, and how can meaningful success criteria be defined?

Different stakeholders from different perspectives often view success in varying ways, so we need success criteria that are both quantitative and qualitative, specific and measurable, tangible and intangible—criteria that balance the efficient use of resources during a project with benefits to all users, stakeholders, and the organization.

Less high-profile projects tend to focus on hard facts to determine success, such as the amount of money spent or the time taken to complete it, and less so on the qualitative intangibles of the outcome, such as public satisfaction and confidence in policing. But if all measures can be identified and agreed upon early on in a project, then the project is much more likely to achieve its tangible and intangible goals.

In the past decade of austerity, the pandemic’s impact and the stretched resources for public safety continue to challenge police forces’ operations in many ways. Sensational headlines criticizing police response to crimes, slow reaction times, and greater demands on police time investigating complex crimes mean forces are under immense pressure.

The focus on police accountability from the bottom up has never been greater; hence, it is essential to prioritize community operations to maintain public order and confidence. Investments in technology and training increase efficiencies, but there is still a need to implement and improve systems that will streamline measures to bring better value for the money spent and increase the positive impacts that the police can have on communities.

These challenges point to one word, “prioritization”—deciding where available financial resources and personnel are allocated during periods of high demand. This is especially true when a segment of the population is calling for less police funding. It is also critical at times when society is facing new, never-imagined challenges such as a global pandemic.

The IACP’s Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) Committee, and its International Working Group, advocate a benefits management approach, as this strategy goes to the heart of delivering projects successfully. To this end, the committee has developed a Benefits Framework (BF) to assist police leaders in informing, supporting, and prioritizing decisions when implementing change and to provide the information and tools to help law enforcement in its journey to continuously improve policing capability.

The BF is not prescriptive but provides vital principles and practices to consider during each stage of a project life cycle to promote a benefits management culture and a consistent approach for benefits management activities and projects.

All projects should bring benefits to the organization—otherwise they need not be undertaken. Still, benefit realizations are often not included when such projects are discussed, planned, and even implemented. This is where the BF will assist by ensuring a clear link between benefits; project objectives; project requirements; and ultimately, project success.

The key to success is setting up projects correctly in the first place and avoiding the well-rehearsed causes of failure: lack of clear objectives, insufficient resources, and over-ambitious cost and time frame, among others. All these mistakes can be avoided if tackled in a project’s early stages with the assistance of the BF roadmap.

What Is BF?

Simply put, a BF is the identification, definition, planning, tracking, and realization of benefits and is a structured approach for maximizing good business outcomes for an organization implementing change. It is fundamental to effective program and project management and successful delivery.

How Can BF Help Policing?

Each year, balancing the budget for policing is a significant challenge for most agencies, so how can the BF support police departments and agencies as they strive to increase capacity, manage demand, and work more effectively to provide an increased level of service?

The first step is to measure performance, including the expected benefits of significant projects, to learn vital lessons and improve the system over time.

The use of the BF will support leaders as they focus on various challenges of potential projects:

• Competing priorities
• Funding availability (or lack thereof)
• “Political” influences

Lack of a streamlined development of a “justification” or “business case” to support approvals. The BF will provide clarity on the best choice based on defined priorities and assist in providing solid evidence for the successful results of investment in technology to governing bodies.

Why Change?

Law enforcement faces significant challenges, whether policing through the pandemic, responding to public disorder, managing undue political influences, or managing daily policing, all exacerbated by the lack of clarity about what society wants from its police services.

Changing legacy systems will improve performance and reliability, increase security standards, reduce costs, and evolve processes to fit a changing, demanding environment. Equally important is defining what the change would look and feel like for the business users and stakeholders. This ensures subsequent design and delivery are anchored in delivering tangible business outcomes and that the project is user-centric in its approach.

Effective BF management is essential to

• measure performance,
• deliver the broadest possible benefits to the internal and external community,
• provide value for money to the public and funders (not just financial supporters), and
• create opportunities to identify and share lessons learned.

Benefits are the primary reason organizations undertake change or implement new technologies. A benefit is a positive and measurable impact of organizational change; for example, introducing technology to automate business processes may make the organization more efficient and save money or resources by using the new processes.

Anticipated benefits justify an organization investing in new systems, technology, and business changes. Senior stakeholders and decision makers are more likely to adopt a positive approach to change and investment if they are advised of what their return on investment will represent. Measures and metrics are essential elements of benefits without which an organization or senior stakeholders cannot measure the progress, success, or consequences of new technology or organizational change.

Benefits can be tangible (e.g., money saved, jobs created) or intangible (e.g., corporate reputation, quality of life improvement). Some may be quantifiable (e.g., reduced costs) or may instead be qualitative (e.g., greater public satisfaction).

Fundamentally this means that benefits

• should be measurable—if they cannot be measured, they cannot be claimed as realized;
• create the link between tangible outputs and strategic goals;
• are the improvement resulting from the outcome (the result) of the change—they are not the change itself; and
• ensure there is an alignment of effort, resources, and investment toward achieving organizational objectives.

Ongoing Successful Use of BF

Policing in the UK had to undertake transformation to “do more for less” following the implementation in 2008 of Austerity Measures. Further cuts to police funding were announced in the October 2010 Spending Review as part of the government’s program to tackle the massive deficit, with funding set to reduce by 20 percent in real terms by 2015–2016. Even as recent as 2020, the police were facing a new era of austerity cuts fueled by the coronavirus crisis, with some forces potentially facing their most severe annual budget cuts to date.

The National Police Chief’s Council and 43 forces of England and Wales established collaborative and national programs to meet these challenges with a centrally controlled funding unit to design systems to collaborate and work more efficiently and effectively. All programs were funded by the UK Home Office based on benefits-based business cases that showed how each program delivers

• new ways of working and cultural change,
• new ways of engaging and transacting with the public,
• common technology platforms, and
• the sharing of services at a regional and national level.

The Home Office controlled and monitored funding by establishing the benefits of investing in new policing capabilities and measuring their success. Without identifying and articulating the benefits, funding would not have been provided, as was the case with many initiatives that did not sufficiently describe the positive improvements they would make if funded.

UK police forces have had to change nearly every aspect of their planning and operations due to austerity. Many of those changes, aided by the BF, have improved policing, with increased efficiencies and streamlining measures that bring better value for money.

Like the UK model, the CJIS Benefits Management Approach covers identifying, profiling, and ongoing management of benefits. It provides the advice and guidance required to identify and analyze relevant metrics to determine whether the delivery of the capability has been successful or not.

BF Management Challenges

There are common challenges faced by organizations when adopting and applying benefits management. Major projects frequently involve a large investment, high levels of complexity, and a changing political landscape during a more extended delivery period, which means benefits management can be more challenging. Some of these challenges and suitable mitigating actions are summarized in Table 1, but they represent only a snapshot.

The IACP CJIS Committee has adopted the BF to help establish a standard approach to identifying and defining benefits, including a methodology and realization plan to assist in the diverse reform of priorities.

The success of a program or project should not only be measured by the delivery of outputs by time, cost, and quality; it should also be determined by the positive and measurable improvements (benefits) that have been delivered.

These benefits will be determined by

• the objectives of the program or project,
• the services or capabilities that the program or project will deliver, and
• the business outcomes that the provided services or capabilities will enable.

Use of the BF will help define the outcome that will be achieved and clarify some of the following: Why is this change desirable? What value does it add? What is the reason for this change being implemented? What difference does it make to the officer, public, or others involved in receiving outputs from this changed working method?

For example:

As a <<Police Supervisor>>, I want to <<easily view the number of incidents my team has responded to in the last 30 days, including the time, location, and duration of response>>, to <<understand the demand on my team and accurately plan staffing levels to meet this demand and respond to calls within my defined SLAs>>.

The innovative use of information technology to support new policing and public engagement approaches is vital for police services to remain relevant in a digital age. The BF model will establish a baseline, as without a baseline, it is impossible to measure whether the value defined in the business outcome is being realized.

The BF is a robust, reusable, and scalable benefits approach that any police department can utilize to support the business rationale for introducing technology or policy-based change and regularly and systematically assess performance and return on investment.

Furthermore, the more dire or challenging the circumstances facing a police agency or a government entity, the more essential the BF is. It is exactly the recipe for defense against police defunding measures, which focus purely on the imperfections of law enforcement. Proper use of the BF can provide clear justification for the continued existence of certain elements of policing and support requests to maintain and even increase funding for such public safety activities.

The current COVID-19 pandemic is yet another challenge that begs for the prioritization and justification the BF can provide. During such a health crisis, not everything can be done—some things must be prioritized in the interest of maximizing public safety and civil stability.

It is for both these examples and many others that the IACP CJIS committee makes the case for a BF to be a part of all substantial police decision-making. It worked for UK police forces during trying times, and it can work for the rest of this global law enforcement community as well, no matter the circumstances they face.

Please cite as

Jill Battley and Jed Stone, “Making the Case for Agency Success,” Police Chief Online, September 21, 2022.