Post-Project Benefits Management in Large Organizations - Insights of a Qualitative Study

In the last decades, corporate investments in IT constantly increased and became a substantial part of business investments. Thus, researchers have sought to understand the effects of these investments and the practices that lead to more effective investment into IT. One stream of this research focuses on explicitly managing benefits. It links into IT investment appraisals as well as into IT project management with an emphasis on the latter. Extant research of benefits management focuses on the benefits-driven chartering and execution of IT projects. Thus, this research does not address benefits-related effects of the usage phase of IT investments, foregoing the opportunity of managing benefits based on the realization planned and emerging work practices over time. Against this background, this paper aims to identify the current state of benefits management and derives implications for post-project benefits management based on a qualitative study with eleven IT executives (mostly CIOs).