Rasmus Rytter - Benefits Realisation: The Change-Driven Approach to Project Success

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 3
3. Chapter 5
4. Chapter 7
5. Chapter 11

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12

Rasmus Rytter

This edition first published 2022.

Copyright 2022 by Rasmus Rytter. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 9781119859789 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781119859796 (ePub)

ISBN 9781119859802 (ePDF)

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Every day, I get to work with something I genuinely love. My passion is to enable companies and public organisations to realise the full benefit potential of their business change projects. It is my hope that this book will inspire people to create the change needed to increase the value of the investments put into business change projects.

The purpose of the book is twofold:

• To provide a practical and case-based guide on how to get more value out of your business change projects.
• To make the benefit realisation method an integral part of your way of working with business change projects.

In 2015, I authored a book in Danish called Gevinstrealisering (Benefits Realisation) with my good colleague Jesper Kryer Lind and Per Svejvig from Aarhus University. Together we defined what would prove to be a great stepping stone for the benefits realisation method, namely the benefit map. Since then, the way we use the benefit map has been refined and expanded to cover all parts of the project lifecycle. Furthermore, it has been adapted to accommodate new delivery methods such as SAFe (scaled agile framework). During this time, it became clear that if we wanted to realise the full benefit potential of business change projects we would need the same type of practical and hands-on approach to behavioural change as we had developed for benefits realisation. Succeeding with behavioural change is the key driver for benefits realisation, and too often we saw the work we put into defining and following up on benefits was in vain, as we did not succeed in changing our colleagues' ways of working, hence the benefits realisation method had to include a practical approach to behavioural change.

To really create value within organisations, it is not enough to apply the benefits realisation method on one or two projects. It needs to be used on every single business change project in the portfolio.

With the help of Jesper Kryer Lind and colleagues from Implement Consulting Group, since 2015 I have gained a great deal of experience on the implementation of the benefits realisation method. While there is no one way to implement the benefits realisation method, the most successful implementations share a set of common features I will share with you in this book.

If you are responsible for realising the benefits of a business change project, either as a project manager or as a person with managerial responsibility, this book should be on your reading list. If you are looking for inspiration on how to create more value in your business change projects and increase your organisation's competitiveness and efficiency, this book is highly recommended for you. Read on and be inspired to design a project organisation that will create value no matter the delivery method.

Writing this book, I set out to make it as useful and practical as possible, ensuring that the content would be easy to understand and apply in the real world. I have therefore chosen to limit the number of tools and approaches for working with benefits and change. This also means that a lot of tools and recommendations for ways of working with benefits and change did not make it into the book.

Please reach out to me if you disagree with my selection of tools and ways of working with benefits and change, if you want to share some alternatives, or if you have used the book successfully to realise more benefits. I look forward to these conversations.

If you are about to embark on the benefits realisation journey and need some advice, I would love to hear from you. This book is hardly the end of the line for our knowledge on how to best to create value in projects, and the sooner we share our experience, the faster we can take the next steps on the journey.