Benefits Realisation
What is Benefits Realisation?
Time, effort and resources need to be used to deliver priority benefits. Benefits realisation helps focus planning, development and delivery to optimise benefits.
We’ve seen many situations in which the definition of benefits realisation is unclear. But without clarity and certainty about what benefits realisation is, decision-makers won’t understand its value and often won’t support it.
A DEFINITION
At Wovex, we define benefits realisation as:
“Benefits realisation seeks to ensure stakeholders are satisfied with the benefits achieved from investments in change.”
We’ve worked with organisations from around the world to successfully incorporate benefits realisation since the 1990s when benefits realisation evolved to address one issue:
“Investments in organisational and technological change do not consistently deliver sufficient benefits for stakeholders.”
This was especially true for promises made regarding the benefits of new technology, as there was a sense of optimism and lack of understanding of its actual capabilities. Benefits realisation provides needed clarity to address this.
Now, benefits realisation has spread beyond technology into other areas of investment in change. For example, will new ways of working increase the quality of services? How can we change the buildings we manage to lead to greater capacity? How can we adapt what we currently have to respond to changing customer demands?
Benefits realisation takes risk, costs, resources and stakeholders into consideration to ensure benefits are sufficient. It does this through approaches such as benefits mapping, defining measures and how plans contribute to them. Also, in delivery, reviews help keep the achievement of benefits on track.
THREE ANSWERS BENEFITS REALISATION PROVIDES
Investment in projects and change can be unfocused, misunderstood, and fail to deliver enough of the needed benefits for stakeholders consistently. Do you know:
- Why is a project needed? Why is it important to us in terms of objectives and key results it will enable us to have?
- What will enable this to happen? What initiatives, projects etc., are needed to cause these benefits to be realised?
- How are we doing in delivering the benefits? What progress on delivering the benefits are we making based on evidence, rather than opinion?
Without benefits realisation, these questions are hard for stakeholders, decision-makers or change teams to answer. This is because they do not have the tools, approaches and information that it provides. At best, without it, the clarity is restricted to a few people but not widely shared. Not knowing the answers leads to uncertainty, confusion and poor decisions.
For example, teams working together may not know the impact on customer satisfaction they need to pull together to achieve. Efforts can be wasted as they focus on activities that aren’t aligned.
With benefits realisation, they will have a clear definition of the expected contribution they are expected to make, with measures providing feedback for them. These definitions and measures allow the teams to plan how they will make the needed difference to the measures. They will be more focused, motivated and use their efforts and resources efficiently and effectively.
Get ideas on the potential return on investment (RoI) from benefits realisation here.
Understand key benefits and features here.
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