Benefits realisation
Establishing whether the outcomes a business case promised actually occurred, which requires measurement designed before the project starts.
A business case is a prediction. Benefits realisation is the act of scoring it, and it is distinct from delivering the project, which produces outputs rather than outcomes.
It has to be designed at inception. The UK Evaluation Task Force found that evaluation is often not planned early enough for teams to identify suitable data sources, secure the permissions to access them, or collect new data. An evaluation is a comparison, and a comparison needs a recorded before.
Sources
Evaluation Task Force, Government Major Projects Evaluation Review, April 2025, for the coverage and quality figures across the 227 projects in the 2023-24 Government Major Projects Portfolio. HM Treasury, The Green Book, 2026 edition. ISO 21502:2020 for benefit management as a project practice.
Belongs to
Inception & Development
Argued in full
Whether it was worth doing is the least evaluated question