Project Management

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Benefits Realization: Are You Getting What You Paid For?

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AMJAD ELAMIN PMO DIRECTOR| ADVANCED COMPANY FOR ENGINEERING CONSULTANCY Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

This topic delves into the crucial question of whether organizations are truly realizing the intended benefits of their projects. It explores the common pitfalls that can hinder benefits realization and examines how to ensure that projects deliver the expected value.



Key questions to be addressed:


Beyond Delivery: What are the true benefits? Identifying and defining the desired outcomes and value creation beyond project completion.
Are we measuring the right things? Exploring effective metrics and indicators for tracking and measuring benefits realization.
Are we managing for benefits? Examining the processes and strategies needed to actively manage and realize benefits throughout the project lifecycle.
What are the barriers to benefits realization? Identifying common challenges and obstacles that prevent organizations from achieving intended outcomes.
How can we improve benefits realization? Exploring best practices, tools, and frameworks for maximizing the value of projects and achieving desired outcomes.

This topic aims to spark a critical discussion about the importance of benefits realization and challenge organizations to ensure they are truly getting the value they expect from their projects.
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Keith Novak Tukwila, Wa, United States
Interesting question. I have heard the complaint at the organizational portfolio level before that we frequently don't perform some kind of retrospective to evaluate whether we actually achieved the expected benefit.

I try to evaluate my own projects after completion to quantify my own value for my performance reviews. I find challenges such as a lack of data to estimate the true value, another problem may pop up skewing the data, or that a project may have an extended payback period.

Project managers go on to different jobs once a project is completed and are not usually tracking them after the fact. Business management groups track trend data but typically can't attribute them to specific changes. In civil engineering, there is often an "as built" survey that compares the designed work to how it was completed. I really haven't seen that concept applied much on the business side of operations.

Sometimes there is a political motivation to not validating the benefits realization. When a project is very successful, there is often a ceremony to celebrate. Companies often try to ignore or hide the failures by contrast so there is less attention on what went wrong. Some executive may be encouraged to retire, but it is done very quietly.
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Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina
Just to add something, all this topic is addressed in the business analysis related documentation and role definition created by the PMI. Additionally, you will find a benefit standard too.
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Phil Guerin Consultant/Director| Hague Consulting Limited Wellington, New Zealand
My work is across both the private sector and the public sector. In my experience, the private sector projects either have very clear benefits based on Return on Investment (ROI) or they are done with a basic funding paper to the Board to replace an obsolete system or comply with a regulatory requirement in which case there is no benefits measurement or formal realisation.

In the public sector there is supposed to be a formal benefits realisation plan, usually linked to Investment Logic Mapping (ILM), and benefits realisation will use a framework from PMI or PRINCE2. Benefits realisation may also be linked to Better Business Cases (BBC) - used in UK, Australia and NZ.

All of that sounds great - and some agencies do it very well e.g. New Zealand Transport Agency. In many cases, there is very little actual measurement of benefits. It is half-hearted and doesn't last very long - especially if the benefits are hard to realise. There is little motivation to prove benefits after the money is spent so most efforts are quietly dropped, especially if it seems that they will not be as great as expected.

This is disappointing as many of those benefits could be realised if an effort was made to do so. There is a lot of value left on the table after strategic investments have been made - in both the private and public sectors.

A common example is big Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems which are implemented but most of the functionality remains unused. Huge amounts of data are captured but most of it is not analysed, reported, or leveraged e.g. through data visualisations or integrations with other apps.
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Francisco Herrera
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Program Manager, PPM&PMO Specialist.| Coppel, Mexico. Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico
A post-mortem is being carried out by the company where I work to evaluate the estimated benefits. In the spirit of improving accuracy, I believe that every practice should be reviewed at the end to be improved.

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