The Benefits Realisation Register

The Benefits Realisation Register is a valuable tool to support the project manager to manage the realisation of anticipated business benefits available from the implementation of a new system

The register is not only useful to document and manage the realisation of benefits, it can also be utilised to evaluate and communicate the success of a project or of certain aspects of it.

The following list shows possible headers of the benefits realisation register:

• Benefit
• Current business process
• Cost of the current business process
• New business process
• Cost of new business process
• Who is responsible for realising the benefit
• How will the process be evaluated
• Realisation date
• Realisation reviewed by

Benefit

Explain as clearly and succinctly as possible the benefits to be realised. An example could be "Reduce the amount of paper reports printed for manual approval."

Current business process

Describe the current business process.

Cost of the current business process

Explain the cost of the current business process so it can be compared against the new benchmark set for the new business process. Cost can be in dollar terms and in time, which should be translated to efficiency gains.

New business process

Describe as briefly as possible how the new business process will be. There should be enough information to clearly articulate how the new process is changed to support the benefit anticipated.

Cost of new business process

In this section the cost of the new business process should be estimated in order to enable the project manager and stakeholders to have clear visibility of improvement, or not, when comparing the new business process against the current one.

Who is responsible for realising the benefit

It is important to clearly define the stakeholders that are responsible for the realisation of potential benefits. The project manager is responsible for managing the project and to ensure that the best possible outcome is achieved. Nevertheless, business unit managers are responsible for the management and improvement of business processes associated with their units, they work together with the project manager to realise the anticipated benefits.

How will the process be evaluated

A brief description of how to evaluated the business process in question. This is often achieved by comparing both business processes, old and new, in term of effectiveness and efficiency.

Realisation date and Realisation reviewed by

The last two columns are purely for management purposes, to ensure that there is a history and log and the review of the anticipated benefits.