Benefit Realisation

Projects should be justified by their expected benefits.

Organisations should record expected benefits and track progress towards achieving them. The majority of benefits will be realised over a period of months or years, and often after the project has been closed.

Integrating benefits into the project context

The management and realisation of benefits is relevant to all stages of a project and the final realisation of benefits may extend beyond project closure. The benefits of a project will initially be identified and considered while the project is still at the concept stage and be further refined in the definition phase. The process for the management and tracking of benefits will be designed and agreed in the planning phase. This planning needs to include any required changes to organisational processes and also the capture of both baseline and on-going metrics.

Benefit Realisation in i-lign

You can record expected benefits and track progress using reviews.

Benefits and Measures

Benefits are typically high level descriptions of what you hope to achieve. They can contain any number of measures, which are used to record the quantifiable aspects of the benefits. For example, if your benefit was 'Improved staff morale' then your measures might be '10 percent annual staff turnover' or '90 percent of people enjoy their work'.

The measure allows you to enter an expected amount (eg 10) and a unit (eg 'percent annual staff turnover'). The descriptive part is configured in User Defined Values under 'Benefit Measure Unit'.

Reviews

You can create as many reviews as you want to record a baseline and track progress. In each review you can enter information for as many or as few benefits as you want, and you can set up your review schedule into the future.

As benefits are high level they are either marked as 'achieved' or 'not yet achieved' in a review. This will be a subjective assessment based on the measures and other qualitative information. For example you might make a judgement about the 'mood' in the office in deciding whether you have achieved better staff morale. For measures you enter the actual amount that you've recorded in your measurement process.