Benefits Realization … Will Organizations Invest What It Takes?

There’s a lot of talk today in project management … and in the business world … about benefits realization. Sounds like a good thing … sounds like an obvious thing we should be doing, but is it realistic to implement? Most organizations stop tracking metrics at project closure, so if they are really serious about capturing the true benefits of their projects, how are they going to do this? There are models out there … both Steve Jenner from the UK and Craig Letavec from the US show us varying models. One of the most important things that I see is putting in place a role to oversee the anticipated benefits beyond project closure.  Similar to a Risk Manager, this role would be on the lookout for developments both positive and negative: not only how the expected benefits were materializing, but emerging benefits, along with downsides … “disbenefits” to coin a word. A Benefits Manager’s work would continue long after the project closes.  In addition to this new role, both Benefits Realization models cited above include additional processes that would need to be implemented.

New roles … new processes … more overhead … will organizations feel it is worth it?

I think they should. Because the statistics show they must. Gartner research shows that investment success rates are below 60% and Deloitte reported in its Enterprise Cost Management Survey Report that nearly 50% of all cost initiatives fail to achieve their goals. More recently, PMI’s 2016 Pulse of the Profession research showed that only 62% of projects meet their business objectives, and that figure has declined since 2012.

Improving these stats won’t just happen. Organizations can’t go into benefits realization expecting to see better results without committing to the steps it takes to get there. All too often we jump on the bandwagon and declare we are implementing a new approach, technology, or life cycle to achieve bottom-line improvements in our organization, but then the follow-through is less than desired. The learning curve takes too long and we begin to gravitate back to the way we “used to” do it. But then we don’t see the results we want, and we abandon the initiative all together.

We all know that in our business cases we generally see some nice returns on initiatives we are proposing. However, if we go back to maybe even half of them, I’m not sure management could tell us if we achieved what we set out to do. This is especially true on those projects when the real benefits might not be measured until months after the project had closed and when the real benefit should have begun!

I’m curious … are your organizations talking about this? How are they approaching implementing it? And do you think it will be successful?