The NAO report quotes "24 examples of successful IT-enabled business change". Two of these are analysed below. A paragraph of a few sentences is a powerful communication tool. Constructed in the right way it should also provide the justification for a project.

Example 1

"OGCbuying.solutions (£2 million): eSourcing provides secure collaborative tools used by procurement professionals and suppliers to conduct strategic procurement activities on-line, including tendering, negotiation, contract award and management, to deliver value for money procurement solutions to the public sector."

Using our definition of a benefit: 

Benefit = Stakeholder valuing improvement.

Who are the stakeholders? From the statement they could explicitly include:

• procurement professionals;
• suppliers;
• public sector.

What is the improvement? Explicitly it is "(better) value for money procurement solutions", assuming that the public sector doesn't want worse value for money.

So in this project's business case we might expect to see the key benefit being better value for money procurement solutions to the public sector with detail of:

• How do we define a scale of measurement for value for money procurement solutions?
• How good was the value for money figure before the project was initiated, i.e. what was the Baseline number?
• How good was the value for money figure after the project was delivered, i.e. what number was achieved?

We don't know what scales were used on this project, but  examples of scales that might be relevant include:

• procurement costs (pence) per £ spent;
• staff procurement effort per £ spent;
• percentage of project delays due to procurement problems;
• percentage of public sector customers satisfied with procurement services.

This brief analysis shows that this project statement could have provided greater confidence in the degree of successful change achieved with just a few more words and numbers. Let's hope they exist somewhere.

Example 2

"Environment Agency (£200k): The Fishing Rod Licences project transformed a fixed-hours Post Office based service for 1.2 million transactions a year to a self-service system enabling customers to purchase fishing licences on-line at any time."

Who are the stakeholders?

• Post Office;
• Customers (anglers with Internet access).

What is the improvement? Explicitly the improvement is increasing the time available to purchase rod licenses.

In this case we can answer the standard questions:

• Scale of Measurement: Hours available per week when a rod license can be purchased
• Baseline: 45.5 hours/week (from local Post Office published opening hours)
• Achieved: 168 hours/week (assuming a very high degree of on-line system usability and availability)

Hopefully these short worked examples will enable you to better analyse your own projects for benefit identification. The key point to remember is not to apply your own value to the improvement, but identify the value your stakeholders place in improvement. That is much easier to justify than just "change".