On the day a project is delivered, the client signs off on the closure sign-off form, and the steering committee disbands for the last time. Tucked into that same project's business case sits a section of promised benefits, a cost saving, a productivity gain, that from that moment on nobody opens again.
A governance gap, not an incident
This pattern is not incidental; it is structurally predictable given how project organisations are set up. For as long as it runs, a project has a clear owner: a project manager, a steering group, a sponsor who is accountable. Once the project closes, that temporary structure disappears. The benefits the project was meant to deliver then land in the line organisation. That line organisation rarely has an explicitly assigned owner for the question "are we delivering what the project promised us?"
The British Gate 5 review (Operations Review and Benefits Realisation) is built precisely to close this gap: it is an independent, external review carried out after delivery that specifically assesses whether the benefits from the business case have actually been, or are being, realised — and whether governance is in place to keep measuring that over the longer term. That last point carries real weight: Gate 5 doesn't just ask "are the benefits there," but also "who keeps tracking that in the years ahead, now that the project no longer exists?"
What the Dutch Court of Audit said about this
This is not a purely British phenomenon. In 2013, the Dutch Court of Audit (Algemene Rekenkamer) found, in its report on the government's approach to ICT, that the realisation of benefits from business cases was still too poorly monitored, and recommended using business cases both at the start and throughout the project as a steering instrument. That is an indirect but clear acknowledgement of the same problem: the benefits section of a business case is taken seriously at the outset, and then insufficiently actively tracked, let alone after the project has closed.
Why this is a harder problem than it looks
Measuring benefits realisation is not straightforward in substance. Some benefits are directly measurable: a cost saving on a specific budget line. Others are more diffuse: improved customer satisfaction, faster turnaround times that only become visible after months, cultural change that cannot be captured in a single figure. The OECD sustainability criterion explicitly acknowledges this: it asks about the financial, social and institutional capacity to sustain benefits over time, not just whether they are present on the delivery date.
That makes benefits realisation governance something that must be set up in advance, not something that can be improvised afterwards. If, at the start of a project, no one has recorded who is responsible for tracking benefits after delivery, and how that will be measured, the odds are slim that this will be picked up spontaneously once the project is closed.
Three questions every evaluation should ask
For an evaluation report that wants to take benefits realisation seriously, there are three questions that go beyond a general statement of satisfaction. Are the realised benefits compared, quantitatively or qualitatively, against what was stated in the original business case, not "the project went well," but a concrete test against the promise? Is there attention to the sustainability of those benefits: do they persist, or were they a peak that has since faded? And is there, at the moment of evaluation, a designated owner for follow-up measurement, now that the project team no longer exists?
Together, these three questions form category 2 of the EvaluatieScore rubric: benefits realisation versus the business case. It is one of the categories where, in practice, the biggest gaps appear, not because organisations don't consider the question important, but because there simply is no mechanism that keeps asking it after delivery.
No proven causal link, but a demonstrable pattern
It is important to stay precise here: there is no scientific evidence that instituting benefits realisation governance automatically leads to more benefits being realised. What is solidly supported, through the British Gate 5 methodology, the OECD sustainability criterion, and the findings of the Dutch Court of Audit, is that without explicit governance, benefits realisation is, in practice, often left unmonitored. That is a more modest, better-supported observation, and it is the observation underlying this category in EvaluatieScore.
Upload your evaluation report for €15 at dutchmind.com/producten/evaluatiescore and see within minutes whether category 2, benefits realisation versus business case, has actually been filled in or is largely left blank.
Sources
- HM Government / Cabinet Office–IPA (nu NISTA) (2021), Gate 5: Operations Review and Benefits Realisation (Assurance Portfolio Standard, V1.0) — assets.publishing.service.gov.uk.
- Algemene Rekenkamer (2013), Aanpak van ICT door het Rijk 2012 — rekenkamer.nl.
- OECD DAC Network on Development Evaluation (EvalNet) (2019), Evaluation Criteria (herzien, DCD/DAC(2019)58 FINAL) — one.oecd.org.