Many IT projects we see believe that they are serious about achieving benefits, but the actions demonstrated show that they do not have the capabiltity to turn intent into outcomes.  Many of the problems arise from how people perceive benefits. Our experience indicates that people fall between two camps:

• Those that believe benefits arise from project actions.
• Those that believe project actions are derived from benefit aspirations.

The first camp base their benefit realisation strategy on hope.  The second camp construct their whole project around realising benefits.  Unfortunately much of the documented material on benefit realisation is adopted as a "bolt on" to formal project management methodologies rather than being an ingrained way people think about projects.

A quote from the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) website indicates the gap between the specification of benefits and their expected emergence:

"Benefits management involves monitoring for the emergence of expected policy benefits, which must have been specified previously into measurable elements."

In a benefits driven project, every project action is selected, planned and executed in terms of its contribution to desired benefits. If people cannot explain how a project action contributes to one or more benefit, then either the action is superfluous or we have missed a required benefit.