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Considerable resources are wasted on software projects delivering less than the planned benefits. Herein, the objective is to synthesize empirical evidence of the adoption and impact of benefits management (BM) in software development, and to suggest directions for future research. A systematic review of the literature is performed and identified 4836 scientific papers of which the authors found 47 to include relevant research. While most organizations identify and structure benefits at the outset of a project, fewer organizations report implementing BM as a continuous process throughout the project lifecycle. Empirical evidence gives support for positive impact on project outcome from the following BM practices: identifying and structuring benefits, planning benefits realization, BM during project execution, benefits evaluation and the practice of having people responsible for benefits realization. The authors suggest four research directions to understand (1) why BM practices sometimes not are adopted, (2) BM in relation to other management practices, (3) BM in agile software development and (4) BM in the context of organizations' value creation logics.

It is well‐documented that many software projects deliver fewer benefits than planned. However prior research has had a stronger focus on the ability to deliver within budget, on time and with the specified functionality, than on what to do to successfully deliver client benefits. The authors have conducted a survey collecting information about benefits management practices, agile practices, use of contracts, and the perceived success in delivery of client benefits. The authors received responses from 83 software professionals with information about 73 recent and 74 older software projects. There was no statistically significant improvement of the delivered client benefits from the older to the recent projects. Statistically significant findings, applying a general linear model‐based analysis, include that the degree of success in delivering client benefits is connected to a project having: (i) a plan for how to realise the benefits, (ii) implemented practices for benefits management during project execution, (iii) frequent deliveries to production during the project execution, and (iv) a process for the evaluation of realised benefits after project completion. The authors argue that greater use of these practices represents a potential for organisations to increase their success in delivering benefits from software projects.

Information Technology (IT) investments in the public sector are large, and it is essential that they lead to benefits for the organisations themselves and wider society. While there is evidence suggesting a positive connection between the existence of benefits management practices and the realisation of benefits, less is known about how to implement such practices effectively. The aim of this paper is to provide insights into when benefits are most likely to be realised, and how benefits management practices and roles should be implemented, in order to have a positive effect on the success of projects in terms of realising benefits. We collected data relating to 10 public IT projects in Norway. For each project, information on benefits management was collected from project documents by interviewing the project owners and benefits owners and via follow-up surveys. The benefits with the highest degree of realisation were those internal to the organisation, while those with the lowest degree were societal benefits. Projects assessed as having more specific, measurable, accountable, and realistically planned benefits were more successful in terms of realising benefits. Benefit owners were most effective when they were able to attract attention to the benefits to be realised, had a strong mandate, and had the domain expertise.