What is Benefits Realisation?
By Duncan Haughey
You've delivered the project on time, within budget, the customer has signed it off and you've completed your end project report. The end! The project is completed, time to move on, right? Wrong. You can't just expect the benefits to automatically drop out of your project with no effort.
Successful Delivery But no Benefits
Companies spend millions of pounds on projects that never get implemented - not because the deliverable isn't good quality but because there is not the time, energy or enthusiasm to ensure it gets adopted and embedded in the organisation. Often it is because the next big, more exciting, project has come along to distract us.
Have you ever delivered a "successful" project, only to find out later that the product or service was never used or implemented? It's not a nice feeling. So what can you do about it? Benefits realisation could be the answer.
Active Benefits Realisation
As project manager, you are in a unique position to help your customer gain the benefits, detailed in the business case. It can be an additional phase once you have closed the project or run as part of the project itself. It may not follow on directly from the project end and start after a short period of time but before the post implementation review, which typically takes place 3-6 months after the project has been completed.
Opinion seems divided as to whether active benefits realisation is the domain of the Project Manager, but one thing is certain - many projects declared a success never deliver the desired benefit or outcome.
The project manager's role in driving benefits out of the project involves working closely with the customer to ensure the product or service gets firmly adopted and embedded in the organisation. You and your team may be involved in:
- Carrying out demonstrations and presentations
- Delivering workshops and training
- Preparing marketing materials
- Organising product/service launches
- Arranging and chairing meetings
- Finding creative solutions to problems
- Championing the cause
- Driving change
To gain benefits you must have change. In their book The Information Paradox 
John Thorp and DMR's Centre for Strategic Leadership, say that, "It is a central tenet of the Benefits Realisation Approach that benefits come only with change and, equally, change must be sustained by benefits." "People must change how they think, manage and act in order to implement the Benefits Realisation Approach."
Changing the way people think, work and manage is no easy task, but without it your project is in danger of joining a long list of successful project deliveries that never got implemented. So, don't just let your projects deliver and die, ensure the benefits envisaged at the start are realised at the end.
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