The field of benefits management gives guidelines on how to plan and realize benefits  throughout the life-cycle of a system. However, realizing benefits from information systems projects has proven to be challenging in practice. In this paper, we investigate specific benefits management challenges as perceived by practitioners involved in information systems engineering projects. We conducted 22 interviews with respondents representing nine public sector projects, where challenges in managing benefits were elicited and identified. We elicited six specific benefits management challenges: A - Identifying and describing benefits, B - Alignment of work with planned benefits, C - Reception and acceptance of the planned benefits, D - Organizational issues, E - Alternative or competing solutions, F - Measuring and evaluating benefits. Overlaying these challenges with current normative models on benefits management, we find  that: 1. Normative models on benefits management lack sufficient guidance on operative work on how to create information systems fit for realizing benefits and how to introduce these solutions to ensure benefits realization, and 2. Normative models on benefits management do not explicitly leverage the  rapid project learning promoted by modern engineering methods. We conclude that more specific benefits management models should be elaborated, which are integrated into modern information systems engineering practices. This will enable best practices on the continuous adjustments of cost and scope according to evolving knowledge in projects to also be adapted to the management of benefits.

This report provides an overview of the results obtained from a survey on project estimation in Norwegian software companies. The survey was conducted between February and November 2003. The main results are: • We observed that 76% of the projects used more effort than estimated, while 19% used less. The average effort overrun was 41%. • Average effort overrun was 67% in projects with a public client, compared to an average effort overrun of 21% for projects with a private client. • Projects that used an incremental or evolutionary development approach had an average effort overrun of 24%, as opposed to the average 55% overrun for projects that used a waterfall-based development approach. The frequency and magnitude of effort overruns found in this survey seems to be similar to results reported from surveys conducted in other countries in the past 20 years. The observed differences in effort overruns between private and public projects may be caused by differences in bidding procedures, level of client involvement or acceptance procedures. In order to reduce the risk of effort overruns, software companies should: • Focus on analyzing their own estimation performance, and invest in estimation improvement (for instance through experience databases or work breakdown structures). • Differentiate risk buffers based on the type of the customer, development approach and the size of the project. • Try to establish an “as close as possible” dialogue with the customers (e.g. through an incremental development approach). All companies should analyse completed projects, in order to benchmark their performance. This allows for improvement efforts to be identified.