The Real-world Positive Outcomes and Examples of Benefits Realisation

Benefits realisation is a powerful tool that ensures your projects create lasting, tangible value in the short, medium, and even long term. Here's how it does that, alongside a few real-world examples of benefits realisation in action.

Benefits realisation is a project management style and philosophy that allows your teams to track your projects in detail to record and understand the tangible benefits they yield. The positive impacts of a good benefits realisation process have been well understood for decades now, with a wealth of case studies that demonstrate the value it adds to good change management. At a glance, benefits realisation allows you to: 

• create an inclusive project planning process, 
• increase awareness of expected project and organisational outcomes, 
• implement decision-making that is based on expected and tangible/measurable benefits, 
• and improve your accountability and value-delivery in all of your projects.  

Case Studies that Demonstrate The Real-world Value We Help Deliver 

At OpenSky, we use benefits realisation as core part of our client consultation and partnership, as it greatly helps us to track, map, and report on the empirical positive outcomes for our clients, some of whom are the largest public sector and government organisations in Ireland and Europe. This benefits realisation process is closely tied to an exhaustive client consultation process, which allows us to  

• map intricate system requirements and specifications for each project, 
• better design projects to maximise tangible benefits for our clients, 
• frequently check in with clients to ensure that our projects are running to-plan and on-vision, 
• and track the short-term and long-term benefits that projects can yield. 

Here are just a handful of examples of how our work has helped clients to reach real, tangible benefits through our high strategic partnership with them.  

The Project Reporting System (PRS)

The National Transport Authority (NTA)

This project involved the creation of a new system integrated into their existing finance portal, allowing fast and automated project funding approvals. Our teams assessed their existing financing system, objectives, and capital grants payment processes, and delivered a highly automated solution that brought faster processing speeds, fewer and shorter delays between application/payment breakpoints, and significantly more detailed top-down reporting and management. The new system builds and integration wasn’t just a successful deployment; it had far-reaching benefits across multiple teams and stakeholders. 

Real-world benefits of the project: 

• Unlimited and instant automated reporting – reports can be generated instantly and without limit, where before they took hours.  
• Data available across platforms and users with no time restrictions and enhanced digital security.  
• Finance portal query time reduced by 4 hours down to just 2 hours, with ad hoc queries taking just 45 minutes (down from 3 hours). What's more, finance reports now only take 2 days on average to produce (down from 5 days). 

How benefits realisation helped:

• Close contact with affected teams and departments helped us understand and solve the biggest issues that they were facing on a daily basis.
• Detailed mapping of processes before the improvements give us clear metrics that we can use to measure the performance and impact of new tech and tools even months down the line.
• Goal setting for short, medium, and long-term helped us pinpoint features that would yield immediate benefits to finance team users, while delivering longer-term successes that are less tangible (in strategy and top-down management of NTA grants allocations). 

The Health Service Executive (HSE)

This projected delivered a comprehensive online platform for trainee doctors to record and log their clinical and non-clinical work experience electronically for the first time ever. It was designed and build in coordination with doctors, medical staff, and HSE personnel, so that it would make it easy (and free) for trainee doctors without a current training scheme to record and verify their career skills and find work. This E-Portfolio module brought lasting and significant benefits to a great many stakeholders, both in the HSE and in the many medical training bodies that use its Doctors’ Integrated Management E-System.  

Real-world benefits of the project: 

• Trainee doctors and their supervisors can now record and verify all aspects of a clinical and non-clinical work experience, career development, and training electronically, saving time and reducing manual and paper-based processes.  
• E-Portfolio’s integration into the National Employment Record gives doctors and medical professionals a faster and way to find and apply for vacant hospital and clinical site posts.  
• E-Portfolio’s mobile design allows free access to recording work experience, from any device or location, with standardised data structures to career experience, making it easier for doctors to log, verify, and demonstrate their work experience no matter which hospital group or clinical site they’re applying to.

How benefits realisation helped:

• Close consultation with medical experts and the end users who would be affected means that each new DIME module was solving real end-user problems and delivering immediate improvements to their work.
• Top-down awareness of the many small improvements to data standards, structures, communications channels, and platform quality of life features mean that the client gets a detailed record of the many intangible, 'invisible' improvements that projects like this bring to teams.
• Clear awareness of end goals and desired outcomes right from the start allowed us to strategically overhaul and streamline systems for continued return on investment.

The Pathway Accommodation and Support System (PASS)

The Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE) and Dublin City Council (DCC)

In two phrases, our benefits realisation approach was able to introduce a paperless, mobile, and more human-centred homeless services system to Ireland’s critical government assistance programs. This project implemented a modern app build to allow case workers to manage the provision, management, and planning of homelessness services on the move across Dublin and all of Ireland, and was a large factor in accelerating collaboration, bed allocation speed, and top-down system management for over 80 homeless assistance organisations, NGOs, and government agencies.  

Real-world benefits realised: 

• The new PASS system has a modern interface which is more intuitive and easier to navigate, making it easier for all users to access homeless services.  
• The new focus of mobile accessibility in PASS frees up case workers, allowing them to do their job remotely, on the move, or outside of physical office locations.  
• Standardised data structures and more detailed reporting allows more detailed case management, for example differentiating between individuals and family units, and better top-down homeless service reporting and management. 
  

How benefits realisation helped:

• Close consultation with stakeholders gave us a keen understanding of problems, blockers, and other factors that get in the way of case workers' daily routine, so that our end solution directly addresses and solves these challenges. 
• Right from the start, benefits realisation helped us to mark the importance of  the long-term planning and strategic objectives of homeless services, helping us to pick features  (such as automated reporting, data standards improvements, cleaner case records) that directly serve long-term objectives as well as short-term work and system improvements. 
• Consistent client check-ins gave us clear insights into user experience and issues, and allowed us to reprioritise areas for improvement or change that would lead to immediate and long-term benefits.

From just these 3 projects, it’s easy to see the positive changes and value that benefits realisation can bring to any organisation. By closely examining your organisation, processes, resources, objectives, and current practices, benefits realisation can fine-tune projects so that they yield significant long-term tangible benefits to every stakeholder.

Click below to get in touch with us to find out first-hand about our intensive personal partnership, and how we work closely alongside you to yield positive results for your organisation even years after your project has successfully been closed.