Bryland Air: Benefits That Never Arrive, and Twelve People Everyone Needs

Because the gap is not knowledge. The audit facts - no named accountable owner, benefits duplicated across cases, no post-closure review, approval treated as the end - describe missing accountability and a missing lifecycle, not a skills deficit. Training people who are still not accountable for realisation, in an organisation that never checks, changes nothing except their vocabulary.

The MoP benefits management practice runs from identifying and profiling benefits, through defining accountability and planning realisation, to reviewing realisation after the change. Bryland has only the first step, and weakly. The interventions that would move the £5.5m figure are:

• Refuse approval of any business case that does not name a benefits owner with operational authority over the area where the benefit lands - a template change with a hard gate at the Investment Committee.
• A portfolio benefits register reconciled to finance, with each benefit claimed once.
• Realisation reviews scheduled at, say, six and twelve months after closure, with results reported to the portfolio board and a named executive answerable.
• Extend accountability beyond closure: the senior responsible owner's role continues into realisation, because the benefit usually depends on business change, not on the project's deliverables.
• Treat the £18m-to-£5.5m gap as a diagnostic question: how much is measurement failure and how much was optimism? Both need answering, and they need different responses.

Training is a supporting action once accountability exists. Sequence it that way round, or the training will be evaluated on attendance and nothing else.

First make the problem visible: a capacity picture for those twelve roles, showing availability, current allocation and the critical path of each of the four initiatives. Until that exists, the argument is about assertion.

The options are finite and should be presented as such:

• Sequence. All four proceed, none quickly. This is often right, and it is the option organisations resist because it looks like a delay rather than a decision.
• Stop or defer one or more. The 'do less, better' answer, and frequently the highest-value one, because four half-delivered initiatives produce no benefit at all.
• Buy capacity. Contractors relieve the constraint but cost more, take weeks to be productive, and the knowledge leaves with them.
• Reshape scope so parts of the work do not need the scarce role.
• Re-prioritise on deadline, where one initiative has a genuine regulatory or contractual date.

The criteria: strategic contribution, consequence of delay or of stopping, and value delivered per unit of scarce capacity. Sunk cost is not a criterion - it is the argument most likely to be made in the room. The decision belongs to the portfolio board and should be recorded with the consequence stated explicitly ('initiative X deferred to Q3; benefit of £2.1m moves out by nine months'), so that the trade-off is owned by the people who made it.

Then fix the system: a quarterly capacity review, and a capability dimension in the prioritisation scoring, because at Bryland money is not the binding constraint - these twelve people are, and a prioritisation model that ranks only by financial value will keep re-creating this conflict.

It reveals that financial management is being operated as a single approval gate rather than across the lifecycle. MoP's financial management practice covers costing, funding, monitoring and forecasting throughout - approval is one event inside it. Bryland has no post-approval tracking of actual against forecast cost or benefit, no staged release of funds, no re-forecast, and no mechanism to withdraw money from an initiative that is failing.

The consequences are visible in the audit: an £18m claims figure that has never been tested against delivery. With any post-approval tracking at all, the discrepancy would have appeared within a year.

The changes worth making:

• Release funding in tranches against evidence of progress and continuing viability, rather than in full at business case approval.
• Quarterly forecast-to-outturn reporting at portfolio level, reconciled to the finance ledger, with variance explanations and a stated tolerance that triggers re-approval.
• A re-approval trigger when forecast cost exceeds tolerance or expected benefits fall materially, so the Investment Committee sees the decision again while it can still act.
• A defined stop-and-reallocate route, so unspent or no-longer-justified funding returns to the portfolio rather than being quietly absorbed.

The cultural point: an approval process that never revisits its own decisions teaches the organisation that forecasts are for winning arguments. A single post-implementation review, published, does more for forecast quality than any amount of guidance.