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Value Selling & Realization Council

Value Management

Value management glossary

Shared definitions are the starting point for shared standards. Each term is defined in plain language and linked to related concepts.

  • Value Selling

    Value selling is a sales approach in which the seller and buyer jointly quantify the business outcomes an investment should deliver, and use that quantified case as the basis of the buying decision. Instead of arguing about features or price, both sides work from an agreed baseline, agreed measures and an agreed expectation of financial and operational improvement.

  • Value Realization

    Value realization is the practice of confirming that the benefits promised in a business case actually arrive after an investment is made. It carries the original baseline and measures forward into delivery and operation, tracks them on an agreed schedule, and produces evidence that expected outcomes were achieved, missed or corrected.

  • Value Management

    Value management is the umbrella discipline that connects how organisations position, sell, govern and prove business value. It spans value governance, value marketing and positioning, value selling and customer value engagement, providing shared standards, practices and tools so that expected value is defined once and then tracked consistently through to realization.

  • Value Management Maturity Model

    The Value Management Maturity Model is the VSR Council's framework for assessing an organisation's value management capability. It is comprised of four categories — Value Governance, Value Marketing and Positioning, Value Selling, and Customer Value Engagement — which together describe how consistently an organisation defines, sells, governs and proves business value.

  • Value Governance

    Value governance is the ownership, decision rights, standards and reporting that keep value claims accountable. It establishes who approves a business case, which measures count, how benefits are reviewed after approval, and how the organisation responds when realized outcomes differ from the outcomes an investment was justified by.

  • Customer Value Engagement

    Customer value engagement is the joint work a provider and customer do after a purchase decision to turn an agreed business case into realized outcomes. It includes shared success measures, adoption support, scheduled value reviews, and documented evidence of the benefits achieved during the life of the relationship.

  • Business Case

    A business case is the structured argument for an investment: the problem, the current baseline, the proposed change, the expected financial and operational benefits, the costs, the risks and the assumptions. In value management, it is treated as a living record that is revisited after approval rather than a document filed at decision time.

  • Baseline

    A baseline is the documented measurement of how a process, cost or outcome performs before an investment is made. It is the reference point that makes improvement provable: without a baseline agreed by both parties, later claims about realized value cannot be verified or defended to finance stakeholders.

  • Cost of Inaction

    Cost of inaction is the quantified consequence of leaving a problem unaddressed: the recurring cost, lost revenue, risk exposure or capacity loss an organisation accepts by keeping the status quo. It gives a business case a comparison point, because every proposed investment competes against doing nothing.

  • Benefits Realization

    Benefits realization is the management practice of planning, tracking and confirming the benefits of a programme or change initiative. It overlaps closely with value realization, and is the term more commonly used inside enterprise programme management and portfolio governance functions.

  • Return on Investment (ROI)

    Return on investment expresses the net benefit of an investment relative to its cost, usually as a percentage or ratio. In value management it is only meaningful alongside a documented baseline, stated assumptions and a defined measurement period, because the same initiative can produce very different ROI figures under different assumptions.

  • Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

    Total cost of ownership is the full lifetime cost of an investment, including licensing, implementation, integration, operation, support, training and eventual replacement. Value cases use TCO rather than purchase price so that comparisons between options reflect what an organisation will actually spend over time.

  • Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

    A key performance indicator is a measure selected because it reliably reflects progress toward a business objective. In value work, KPIs link an investment to outcomes an executive already cares about, and each one needs an owner, a baseline value, a target and a review cadence to be useful.

  • Value Engineer

    A value engineer is a specialist who builds and defends quantified business cases with customers. The role combines commercial, operational and financial analysis: establishing baselines, modelling improvement, aligning stakeholders around measures, and supporting the customer's internal approval process with defensible numbers.

  • Adoption

    Adoption is the degree to which people actually change how they work as a result of an investment. It sits between deployment and value: capability that is installed but not used produces no measurable outcome, which is why adoption measures belong in a value case alongside financial benefits.

  • Value Proposition

    A value proposition states the specific outcome a customer can expect, for whom, and why it is credible. A value-managed proposition is expressed in the customer's measures rather than the provider's features, and is supported by evidence that comparable organisations achieved comparable results.