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CGEIT: Benefits Realization

CGEIT · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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Benefits Realization

Benefits Realization tests whether IT investment delivers intended value and whether you can prove it. The exam distinguishes outputs from outcomes and benefits, and expects business ownership of benefits with IT enablement. Expect business cases, benefits registers, portfolio and programme governance, and post-implementation review.

Core rules

  • A benefit is a measurable improvement that is advantageous to a stakeholder; an output is a delivered product; an outcome is a changed business state.
  • Benefits are owned by the business, not by IT. IT enables; the business realizes.
  • Every benefit needs a baseline, a metric, a target, a timing and an owner.
  • The business case is a living governance document, reviewed at stage gates-not a one-off budget request.
  • Track dis-benefits and transition costs; they are legitimate parts of the case.
  • A benefits register and benefit dependency map show how outputs lead to outcomes.
  • Post-implementation review compares actuals to the case and feeds portfolio decisions.

COBIT links

EDM02 Ensured Benefits Delivery sets governance direction. APO05 Managed Portfolio, BAI01 Managed Programmes and MEA01 Managed Performance and Conformance support execution. The IT balanced scorecard can translate IT contribution into business language, but it does not replace benefit owners.

Worked example

A CRM project claims '20% sales productivity.' Convert it: order administration time falls from 30 to 20 minutes per order. Baseline: 30 minutes, measured from the order system. Owner: sales operations, not IT. Metric: median handling time per order. Target and timing: 20 minutes at six months after full adoption. Dependencies: clean customer data, training, adoption. Dis-benefit: a temporary 10% productivity dip during transition. Stage gates review data migration and adoption. At six months, actual is 24 minutes, so the case is partly realized and a remedial action is assigned. That is benefits realization.

Traps

  • Counting a delivered system as a benefit.
  • No baseline, so improvement cannot be proven.
  • Assigning benefit accountability to the IT project manager.
  • Ignoring dis-benefits and transition costs.
  • Skipping post-implementation review once the project closes.