When planned IS/IT project benefits are not realized: a study of inhibitors and facilitators to benefits realization

Abstract

IS/IT evaluations reveal that many organizations fail to realize planned benefits from their IS/IT projects. Benefits management researchers argue that organizational change is necessary for the delivery of IS/IT project benefits. However, existing IS/IT evaluation methods adopt a narrow quantitative focus on costs and benefits and fail to consider the organizational dimension. This study brings together the concepts of benefits management and IS/IT evaluation using the Cranfield Benefits Dependency Network (BDN) as a diagnostic tool to examine an under performing IS/IT project. The analysis revealed that planned benefits had not been realized because of a lack of attention to technical and organizational facilitators and inhibitors associated with IT-enabled organizational change.

Useful business cases: value creation in IS projects

“…Benefits management has received particular interest in project management research (Badewi, 2016;Chih & Zwikael, 2015;Coombs, 2015;Marnewick, 2016;Serra & Kunc, 2015). A survey of IS professionals on the importance of respectively project management and benefits management suggests that assigning the responsibility for obtaining benefits is the most critical factor in project investment success, while the business case is the least (Badewi, 2016).…”

The impact of project management (PM) and benefits management (BM) practices on project success: Towards developing a project benefits governance framework

“…Despite an early call to implement BM (Thorp, 1998;Ward et al, 1996), little empirical evidence has been brought to show how much light benefits management sheds on the prevalent ways in which projects become successful. Most of the research conducted on benefits management either explores it at the level of implementation (Bennington and Baccarini, 2004;Coombs, 2015;Lin and Pervan, 2003) or implements and develops the benefits management approach in case studies (Baccarini and Bateup, 2008;Doherty et al, 2011;Fukami and Mccubbrey, 2011;Pina et al, 2013). Nevertheless, a few papers have used generalizable evidence to test the success or level of effectiveness of benefits management (Badewi, 2015;Serra and Kunc, 2015).…”

Benefits management: Lost or found in translation

“…Thus, in the analysis of the evolution of project management research by Turner et al (2011), BM does not figure as a research category. The literature which does exist tends to be either 'how to do it' guides (Bradley, 2006(Bradley, , 2010Payne, 2007;Thorp, 1998Thorp, , 2003 or analysis of BM processes and practices (APM, 2010;APM, 2012;Ashurst, 2012;Breese, 2012;Coombs, 2015;Lin and Pervan, 2003;Lin et al, 2005b;Serra and Kunc, 2015;Ward et al, 2007). Where the processes involved in the adoption of BM are mentioned they may be identified as being subject to further analysis of the data (Ward et al, 2007) or as a topic for further research (Serra and Kunc, 2015).…”