Delivering a new system, app, or platform is great but a deliverable on its own isn’t the win. It’s what that deliverable does for the business that matters. Too often, we finish a project focusing on the need to complete, and the business benefits get left behind.

How do you turn what’s been delivered into something that actually matters to the business? Often the journey starts with an idea that forms a business case.

Tangible and Intangible Benefits in the Business Case

When writing your business case, clearly outline the benefits your project aims to deliver. These typically fall into two buckets:

Tangible Benefits

These are measurable and directly impact the bottom line, for example:

• Reducing costs (e.g. saving £50,000 annually through process automation).
• Increasing revenue (e.g. boosting e-commerce sales by 15% with a new mobile app).
• Improving efficiency (e.g. reducing manual data entry by 20 hours per week).

Intangible Benefits

These are less quantifiable but equally important to long-term business success. Examples include:

• Strengthened brand reputation (e.g. adopting green tech solutions to meet sustainability goals).
• Organisational resilience (e.g. the ability to adapt and respond to unexpected challenges).

Clearly define these benefits and, where possible, include measurable metrics to track them after delivery. Often, one benefit can lead to others such as reducing manual overhead, which frees up resources for more valuable activities. This, in turn, can drive transformative change, open up new revenue streams, and create a ripple effect of positive outcomes. These interconnected benefits should form a comprehensive and compelling story of value.

Practical example

Your business case proposes implementing a new AI-driven customer service chatbot.

How you might track deliverables and benefits:

• Deliverable: Deploy AI chatbot on the company website.
• Business Goal: Reduce customer service response time by 50%.
• Tangible Benefit: Save £200,000 annually by reducing call centre staff hours.
• Intangible Benefit: Improved reputation for accessibility.
• Investment cost: £450,000 over 6 months.

Benefit Realisation Planning

Create a benefit realisation plan relating to each deliverable, this should outline:

• What benefits will be tracked.
• Who owns each benefit (e.g. sales director, operations manager).
• How benefits will be measured (e.g. using analytics, surveys, financial reports).
• When benefits are expected to materialise (e.g. immediately after delivery or 12 months post-implementation).

Planning your project using Waterfall in broad strokes gives you a clear timeline for deliverables and benefit realisation, which can be a standard part of the business case approval process. However, it’s crucial to highlight potential unknowns and risks early on, ensuring they are tracked and mitigated to keep the project on course. There’s often tension between planning in Waterfall and delivering in Agile, and we’ll dive into that contrast in a future blog post.

Baseline and Measure

Establish a baseline before project delivery so you can measure the impact accurately. For example:

• Pre-project customer service response time: 15 minutes.
• Post-project target: 7 minutes.

Embed Regular Benefit Reviews

Integrate benefit tracking into your governance structure. Regularly review benefits alongside project milestones and after delivery. For example:

• During sprint reviews, validate whether deliverables are aligning with expected outcomes.
• In post-implementation reviews, assess how well the business has adopted the solution and what adjustments are needed to maximise benefits.

Manage Change

Benefits realisation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Market conditions, technology trends, or organisational priorities might shift during the project. Use change management practices to adjust benefit targets or even the project scope to ensure alignment with business needs.

Close the Loop

At the end of the project, don’t just hand over deliverables and walk away. Use a formal benefits realisation review to compare what was achieved against what was promised in the business case. Document lessons learned and feed them back into the continuous improvement processes.

Wrap up

It’s easy to get caught up in delivering the “what”, a system, app, or tool and lose sight of the “why.” A robust business case tied to benefit tracking ensures that deliverables translate into actual value.

By focusing on tangible and intangible benefits, involving stakeholders early, and embedding benefits tracking into processes, you’ll not only deliver great projects, you’ll deliver real, measurable success for your business.

Because it’s not about what you’ve built; it’s about what it builds for the business.

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We’ve been an AWS SaaS Services Competency Partner since 2020. If you think we might be the right partner to work with you on your next project, book a no-obligation call with us to talk more about it.

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This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.