Benefits management and realisation

Introduction

The benefits are the sole reason for doing the project. Many projects have been successfully delivered to time and budget, yet have failed to produce any benefits to the organisations commissioning them.

There are many example of this, the Millennium Dome arrived on time and some would argue was a very successful construction project, however it failed to attract the visitors anticipated and did not achieve the benefits anticipated. Studies into Enterprise Resource Planning software implemented in the 1990’s indicated that 46% of companies thought they had achieved no benefits from these projects. The NHS National Programme for IT often announces success in terms of numbers of systems rolled out or numbers of patients directly booked onto hospital waiting list. In terms of metrics of real bottom line benefits e.g. lives saved, reductions in clinical errors or efficiency savings in NHS trust operations there are few statistics to available demonstrate success.

Too often project success is viewed simply in terms of bringing in the deliverables to time and to cost and little thought is paid to making sure that these produce bottom line benefits to the organisation.