Benefit realisation

"Once processes are more efficient, the realisation of benefits, eg cash savings, needs to be managed to ensure actual achievement"

 Surprisingly, some councils work through a long process of business improvement and transformational change, but then fail to achieve the promised benefits or savings at the end. It is often easy to see why, and some examples illustrate this:

• The council which introduces corporate wide electronic document management, and converts all its paper files to electronic form, but then fails to achieve the reduction in office space (and hence cost) because they choose to retan the paper files "just in case"
• Making business processes across the council more efficient (and hence requiring less staff) but failing to achieve the savings in cost by not rationalising the staff savings and shedding jobs
• Investing in a web site but failing to achieve the benefits because the site does not reflect how people want to work, and hence the level of usage remains low (and worse, people may be more inclined to phone up the council to sort out their problems of using the website)