TOP Ideas

Projects don’t deliver outcomes or benefits.  They only deliver outputs

Projects are commissioned to deliver business benefits. Benefits are realized in the business and are at least partly dependent on business endeavours not entirely within the control of the project team. So it’s no surprise that project professionals are wary of being made accountable for business benefits – things they see they cannot wholly control or deliver.

But this thinking assumes that a project can deliver a set of outputs and be ‘thrown over the wall’ to the business with the hope that the expected business outcomes and benefits will be automatically realized.  Of course if they’re not realised, then the business is to blame (of course).

Project ‘outputs’ are too distant from business outcomes to be useful.

The Real Truth: All projects are commissioned to deliver the outcomes and benefits

A project manager may not be accountable for the realization of all of the business benefits, but s/he is responsible for ensuring that the benefits are realizable and, wherever possible, realized.

Featured publication: How to Manage Your Project’s Scope



Your project scope is one of the greatest levers of control and yet is one of the least well managed areas of a project. It is surrounded by a wealth of false beliefs and value-destroying perceptions.

This Guide revisits the end-to-end Scope Management process to enable it to be managed by both the project and governance teams to optimize the potential value of each and every project.

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Some twenty percent or more of benefits can often be realized during the project’s delivery timeframe, and more benefits can be realized immediately on the project’s implementation (i.e. on the project manager’s watch). The project manager cannot ignore this.

In addition, each project should be commissioned to deliver a set of agreed ‘project outcomes’. These ‘project outcomes’ are a subset of the desired business outcomes and have benefits associated with them.

A project’s true measure of success, therefore, is its total realization of its agreed project outcomes and their benefits plus the total enablement of the subsequent business outcomes and remaining benefits. It is not just the delivery of some outputs and completion of the project.

Projects need to be clearly focused on delivering, enabling, and supporting the realization of all of the available business benefits. An ‘on time/budget/to specification’ project that does not enable the realization of the business benefits is a failure!

Therefore, the delivery of outcomes and benefits are fundamental project success measures, and all projects must be focused on their realization from day-1.