Benefits management and agile practices in software projects: how perceived benefits are impacted

Considerable resources are wasted on projects that deliver few or no benefits. The main objective is to better understand the characteristics of projects that are successful in delivering good client benefits. We asked 71 Norwegian software professionals to report information about projects completed between 2016 and 2018. We found that both benefits management and agile practices have a significant relationship with perceived realisation of client benefits. This includes the benefits management practices of having a plan for benefits realisation, individuals with assigned responsibility for benefits realisation, benefits management during project execution, quantification of realised benefits, evaluation of realised benefits, re-estimation of benefits during project execution, and the agile practices of a flexible scope and frequent deliveries to production. The software projects that were successful in delivering client benefits adopted benefits management and agile practices to a larger extent than the less successful ones. Future studies are required to establish more comprehensive understanding of what distinguishes projects that deliver good client benefits from the rest, including studies of the realisation of client benefits in agile software projects.