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Introduction to the Book

Benefits realisation is a method for creating the greatest possible value from a change project. It is a new way of looking at and working with business change projects and other efforts needed to develop an organisation.

The current focus within both public and private sectors on implementing enablers, rather than on realising benefits and achieving the vision or end goal, is so widespread and deep rooted that it needs a clear process and sustained effort to change.

Gerald Bradley, author of Benefit Realisation Management (2010)

Benefits realisation is about focusing on the purpose and benefits we want to achieve and the behavioural change it will require of our colleagues. The method enables us to initiate our projects by designing business change projects (which will from this point on be referred to as 'projects') to create the prerequisites for realising our desired purpose and benefits.

New Behaviour Creates Benefits

The benefits realisation method prioritises behavioural change as the decisive and triggering factor for creating value. The method shows how our colleagues' new way of working creates the desired value. This ability to couple benefits and new behaviours is key to the success of a project. Changing our colleagues' behaviour often requires help. This help is what projects are all about. It could be helping colleagues to continue working in a new way or to overcome their resistance to change. But it could also be helping to support our colleagues in attaining new competencies or create new technical deliverables in the form of processes, IT systems, or products available. The processes, the IT system, and the products are essential but are only part of the means - not the goal. The goal is benefits realisation. In addition to the technical deliverables, we must also build competencies and anchor the new behaviour before reaching our goal.

Among companies and public organisations, there is an ever-growing awareness that value creation is about more than just producing deliverables. Words such as 'value', 'effect', and 'benefits' have found their way into our language when we talk about topics such as projects, creating a greater focus on what value we need to create for our organisation, our customers, or the citizens we want to help. And yet, the practical approach to projects is still characterised by Gerald Bradley's quote above: we focus far too much on deliverables and far too little on change and benefits. There is a growing awareness among project practitioners of the importance of benefits realisation, and a common language for it is steadily developing. However, most organisations still need to define what a focus on value means and integrate a practical approach to benefits realisation and change as part of the way we develop our organisations.1 That is what this book aims to do.

The Structure of the Book

The book consists of five parts. Each part details how to get more out of your projects. You are already well on your way with Part 1, which gives you an overview of key concepts, roles, and introduces the benefit-driven change model that visualises what it takes to create value during a project's lifetime.

The first purpose of the book is to provide a practical and case-based guide on how your organisation can get more value out of your projects. This is detailed in Part 2 and Part 3 of the book. To make it easy for you to apply the content of the book to your project or organisation's project model, the structure of the book reflects the main phases of most projects: an analysis phase (Part 2 of the book) and an execution phase (Part 3 of the book). The book's points are elaborated on through two cases from Nykredit (a large Danish financial company) and the University of Copenhagen, respectively, and detailed descriptions of the most important workshops and activities. Whether your organisation's approach to producing technical deliverables is agile, waterfall, PRINCE2, scrum, or SAFe (scaled agile framework), the way we work with benefits realisation and change management does not change significantly. Nevertheless, as it turns out, the combination with SAFe requires a little extra attention. I will go into this in Part 3.

While Parts 2 and 3 illustrate what it takes to realise more benefits at the project level, Part 4 of the book shows how the benefit-driven portfolio management office (PMO) function can ensure benefits realisation across the portfolio. As soon as we broaden the use of a practical and structured approach to benefits realisation and behavioural change, we get new data on both benefits and the change effort. This enables us to manage and prioritise our portfolio in order to make decisions at the portfolio level that will maximise our benefits realisation.

Part 5 details the book's second purpose: making the benefits realisation method a part of your way of working with projects. There is more than one way of doing that, but the most successful approaches to implementing the benefits realisation method are similar in several ways. One of the organisations that have been successful in implementing the benefits realisation method is Ørsted. Ørsted is a large international renewable energy company, and the company is used as a case study on how to implement the benefits realisation method successfully. But first, you will get a brief introduction to what benefits are and a presentation of the benefit-driven change model, which sets the overall framework for benefits realisation and behavioural change. Additionally, I will introduce a number of the concepts I use along the way in the book.

The Benefit-driven Change Model

The benefits realisation method is an addition to our current technically focused (business change) projects. An additional layer that contains a practical approach to benefits realisation and behavioural change, building on an often well-established and good practice of producing technical deliverables.

In most projects, technical deliverables are just as important as changing behaviour and realising benefits to create the desired value. I will leave it to others to describe the most efficient way of producing technical deliverables and instead focus on how technical deliverables contribute to creating value.

We will use the benefit-driven change model shown in Figure 1.1 to illustrate the tasks a project should include to realise the potential benefits. The benefit-driven change model shows the project from the time its analysis phase is kicked off to after it has been completed. In the analysis phase, we design the project to create value, and the most important step in creating the benefit-driven project design is a benefits realisation workshop. Here we outline the desired benefits and what it takes to realise them. The model shows the three tracks that illustrate the main tasks of the projects, namely the benefit track, the change track, and the technical track.

The Interaction Between the Tracks

The benefit-driven project design is the starting point for the analysis phase (Part 2 of the book), where the content of the three tracks is detailed. Based on that, we will be able to create a business case and decide whether the project should proceed or not. If the project proceeds, the execution phase will require work to be done in all three project tracks as well (Part 3 of the book). Changes in the project's environment and new knowledge make it necessary to continually adjust and optimise all three tracks to maximise the project's benefits realisation. Once the last technical deliverable is produced and the desired behavioural change in the organisation is attained, the project is completed.

The only task in the realisation phase is to follow up on the realisation of the project's benefits. The follow-up on benefits realisation continues until we are confident that value creation is firmly anchored in the business (follow-up on benefits realisation takes place at the portfolio level and is described in Part 4 of the book). In projects with more than one launch, that is more than one effort to anchor a new way of working in the organisation, the follow-up on benefits realisation starts after the first launch when the project is still in the execution phase.

Figure 1.1 The benefit-driven change model.

The Definition of a Benefit

At this point, I have already mentioned the word 'benefit' many times. So, before we go any further, it is important to define what a benefit is.

Definition of a Benefit

A benefit is the result of a change that is considered positive by one or more stakeholders.

These benefits may, for example, include increased revenue or savings in either time or money. Or they may consist of increased job satisfaction, more subject matter expertise, or a better image. They are typically quantifiable, although the task of quantifying them can be so extensive that it is not feasible in practice. Benefits can be both intentional and unintentional. If one or more stakeholders considers the result of a change as negative, it is a negative benefit.

Definition of a Negative Benefit

A negative benefit is the result of a change that is considered...