Executive & Strategy
Investment benefit tracking and realisation
Track promised benefits from approved business cases against actual outcomes in the management accounts, and flag where realisation is diverging from the case that justified the spend.
10–25%
improvement in benefit realisation rate
Opportunity assessment
Moderate impact. Meaningful cost or revenue improvement, likely noticeable at function level but modest relative to total business scale.
Moderate effort. Requires configuration, prompt engineering, and testing. A capable team can get there but expect several months.
Demanding data requirements. Relies on clean, integrated data across multiple systems. Significant data preparation work typically needed.
Low risk. Limited external exposure. A human reviews output before it reaches anyone outside the team.
Moderate people impact. Part of someone's working day changes. Requires training and some adjustment time, but roles remain broadly the same.
Tooling required
Things to consider
Most organisations do not track benefits at all after approval, which is why business cases inflate. The behavioural effect of knowing benefits will be tracked is usually larger than any number the tracking produces.
Attribution is genuinely hard when several initiatives touch the same P&L line. Agree the measurement approach at approval, not at review, and record it in the case.
The output must go to the same forum that approved the spend. Benefit tracking that reports into the PMO and never reaches the approving board changes nothing.
Experiment starter: Take ten business cases approved two or more years ago, extract their promised benefits, and test each against the management accounts. Present the aggregate realisation rate to the board — that number usually starts the conversation on its own.
Go deeper in the playbook
Section — Opportunity Identification, including the AI Opportunity Assessment ScorecardSection — RAG and Knowledge Systems: Unlocking Proprietary DataThis is an decision support opportunity — see the relevant playbook section for how to approach it.More in Executive & Strategy
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AI Transformation Playbook
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