The Management of Benefits: Opening the Black Box of Benefits and Revealing their Collective Production

In the context of projects, benefits management has recently been attracting the attention of practitioners and researchers alike. Project management practitioners are particularly interested in benefits management to demonstrate the connection between project management and projects benefits. For their part, most researchers aim to explain how to establish this connection, by proposing new conceptual frameworks. Yet, a crucial issue remains under discussed: how benefits management is practiced, in concrete situations, and which challenges practitioners face. Although many organizations are considering adopting formal processes of benefits management, benefits management seems fraught with difficulties when it comes to its deployment and its practice. These challenges have been the focal point of our study, which led us to meet with project management practitioners involved in benefits management in five large-scale organizations.