What this site is all about
the starting point …
Roger was a Lecturer in Information Systems from 1997 to 2003 at the Cranfield School of Management in the UK. The hot topic at the time Roger joined the Cranfield SoM Information Systems Group was ‘Benefits Management’. The continual failure of IS/IT projects to deliver their projected benefits to their sponsoring organisations was a recurring theme in both academic and commercial literature. Benefits Management was conceived and developed by Professor John Ward and his team in the Cranfield SoM Information Systems Research Centre as an approach to overcome the limitations of project management methods as then generally applied to IS/IT projects.
The cranfield experience …
Joining with John Ward and his team, Roger spent his 7 years at Cranfield researching and lecturing on project management methods as applied to IS/IT projects. Working initially with John Ward and then more closely with Andrew Davies, who joined the group as a Visiting Professor, Roger developed the initial ideas of Benefits Management into Benefits Assurance, complemented by an ‘IT & Change Framework’, which formalises the structure of IS/IT projects.
Moving on …
Roger and Andrew left Cranfield in 2003 and set up e-change Training Limited as a training and consultancy company. Roger set up several versions of a company website until the company was wound up in 2008. Roger started to recover some of the material into a private website but the work gradually fell into abeyance. This site is intended to recover some of that lost material.
Find out more …
The papers and reports from which the material was derived can be found on our PUBLICATIONS site.
Historical Background
Fundamentals of Benefits Assurance
This post describes the fundamental thinking that (eventually) came to underpin the Benefits Assurance approach.
Some Frequently Asked Questions
This post addresses some FAQs about the why, what and how of Benefits Assurance.
Introduction to the e-change Training site
This post recalls the introduction to the e-change Training limited website, originally published in 2007.
Has the Benefits Management field moved on?
TIME MARCHES ON bUT …
I haven’t given any thought to Benefits Management for many years and when I decided to set up this archive as a part of my family website project, I knew the material was ‘of its time’ (i.e. the early – mid 2000s). I began to wonder what progress has been made since I retired and so, made a quick google search to see what I could find.
I was surprised to find very little!
I did, however, come across an interesting review paper written a couple of years ago:
“Opening the Black Box of Benefits Management in the Context of Projects”, by M. Aubry, S. el Boukri and V. Sergi published in the Project Management Journal, 2021, vol. 52(5), 434 – 452
If, however, someone comes across this site and can give the lie to my scepticism, I would be interested to know the details if you would care to contact me.