Return on Investment (ROI) is an essential resource for business leaders, line managers, and learning professionals who want to gain a comprehensive understanding of the ROI methodology. The easy-to-understand format provides step-by-step processes and applied examples to successfully implement ITIL Return on Investment in any company. The ROI process has become the cornerstone of organizational assessment, measurement, and evaluation strategies. Combined with strong performance consulting processes and tools, the ROI process is transforming the workplace learning and performance professional's work with business partners. Return on Investment (ROI) Basics provides tremendous insight, experience, and wisdom the Phillipses have to offer on results-based measurement and evaluation in an easy-to-understand-and-apply resource.

I hear the term ROI often enough but rarely see it calculated. It is said that business is all about numbers-- financial statements, stock prices, bonus plans--but then there are IT projects, with budgets that are clear enough (or at least large enough) but monetary returns that often get taken for granted. With this anomaly in mind, I picked up Show Me the Money by Jack J. Phillips and Patricia Pulliam Phillips. Although dry and weak on examples, Show Me the Money provides a practical framework for calculating ROI. The book breaks the calculations into several levels:

* Buy-in
* Learning
* Application
* Impact
* Monetary value of impact


The first three levels of metrics do not measure ROI itself, rather a project's ability to deliver ROI. Without organizational buy-in, without the learning of new skills, without the actual application of new processes, a project cannot deliver value. And so it is essential to set objectives for these metrics, measure them at appropriate times during the project, adjust to the feedback, and evaluate them at some point after project completion.

These objectives for buy-in, learning, and application should be framed to deliver the desired impact, which itself must be measured. In measuring impact, you must decide upon the appropriate units and methods of data collection. The units may be just about anything relevant to financial results: sales revenue, cost, productivity, errors, employee turnover. By giving multiple approaches to data collection, the authors challenge a common assumption and insist that anything can be measured.

Finally, apply monetary values to the units, subtract project costs, and calculate ROI. For details on monetary values, please see the book. But let me point out an obvious suggestion that often goes overlooked by IT decision makers: partner with the accounting department. Those folks may either know the values or have a good sense about how to obtain them.

From IT to HR, from boardroom to shop floor, increased accountability for achieving high-value results for new initiatives is the norm in every organization. The Phillips', the world's leading experts on ROI strategy, distill their years of experience and research into proven tools for determining the value of any project before, during, and after implementation. They present a comprehensive method for measuring the hard-to-measure, and placing monetary value on the hard-to-value. They even show how to measure and place value on "intangible" qualities like leadership, creativity, customer loyalty, employee engagement, and more. Developed in an easy-to-read format and fortified with case studies, checklists, tips, and tools, this work clarifies and resolves the mystery surrounding the allocation of monetary value. It gives change agents everything they need to provid e detailed evaluations of the potential and actual financial benefits of any project or program.