Professional Business Analysts / Afterwards

Benefits realisation is somebody else's job and usually nobody's

The case is built to get approval and rarely revisited.

A business case predicts a benefit, the prediction secures funding, and the project delivers. What almost never happens is a return to the prediction to see whether it occurred. The team has dispersed, the sponsor has moved, and the measurement would be politically awkward for everybody who signed it.

The consequence is an organisation that cannot learn about its own estimates. Every case is built on assumptions that have never been checked against outcomes, and the assumptions drift toward whatever is required to clear the approval threshold.

The analyst is not usually accountable for this and is often the only person positioned to make it possible. Recording, at the point the case is made, exactly what would be measured and where the figure would come from, costs an afternoon and is the difference between a benefit that can be checked and one that cannot.

Whether anybody checks is beyond your control. Making it checkable is not, and it is one of the few things a person in an advisory role can do that compounds over years.

It is worth noting that measurability sometimes changes the case itself, which is the real reason it is resisted. A benefit that cannot be stated in checkable terms is frequently a benefit that was not thought through, and the attempt to specify the measurement is what reveals it. That is uncomfortable at the approval stage and it is considerably less uncomfortable than discovering it two years later with the money spent.