Before you close
Benefits Realization Tracker
See whether the benefits the business case promised are arriving, which ones are off course, and which ones nobody could measure in the first place.
Open the benefits register, with a column per month or quarter for the measurements, or add the measurements as a second file. Read inside your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Benefits register
Drop a spreadsheet here
One row per benefit: the measure, baseline, target, target date, owner and project, and the date it can first be measured. Measurements can be columns on the same sheet, one per month or quarter.
Measurements (optional)
Drop a spreadsheet here
If measurements are kept separately: one row per reading, with the benefit ID, the date and the value.
The part of the business case nobody checks
Projects are approved on their benefits and closed on their deliverables. The benefits arrive, or do not, months later, when the project team has moved on. A benefits register is meant to keep track, but most go stale in the same few ways: the baseline was never measured, the benefit has no owner, a saving is claimed before the thing that produces it went live, or two projects count the same saving and the portfolio adds both.
On the path, or off it
Each benefit moves from a baseline to a target by a date. The page draws the straight path between the two, from the date the benefit could first be measured, and sets the latest measurement against it: how far along the way from baseline to target it is, against how much of the time has gone. Ahead, on track within a tolerance you set, behind, moving the wrong way, achieved, or past its date without getting there. Increases and decreases both work: the direction comes from the baseline and the target.
What stops a benefit being measured
A benefit with no baseline, target, measure, date or owner is listed first, because it cannot be on track. A gain recorded before the benefit was measurable means something other than the project moved the measure, or the claim came early. And benefits in different projects with the same measure are flagged as possibly counted twice.
What this does not do
It reads the measurements it is given; it does not know whether the project caused the change. A straight path is a simple yardstick, and many benefits start slowly and speed up, so a benefit a little behind early on may be fine. Flagged double counting is a question for the two projects, not a ruling: the benefit may be deliberately split between them.