Effects of Ways of Working on Changes to Understanding of Benefits – Comparing Projects and Continuous Product Development

The practices of benefits management are designed to help development initiatives to identify and realize the benefits of a system under development. Although several benefits management frameworks and guidelines exist, practitioners experience challenges in applying the practices. In particular, practitioners experience challenges in that their understanding of what benefits the system should enable and how the benefits should be realized, changes during the course of a development effort. Since such benefits understanding is affected by experiences with the system in use, we conducted a survey to investigate if such changed understanding is affected by whether development is organized in projects (whose organization terminates after main deployment) or as continuous product development (whose organization persists throughout the lifecycle of the system). We find that (1) there is no difference in the occurrence of changes in understanding between the two, but that (2) practitioners in projects think that changed understanding could have been obtained earlier. There is (3) no difference in how one takes advantage of changes in benefits understanding, but (4) practitioners in continuous product development think that the use of changes in benefits understanding is more appropriate than do practitioners in projects. We also look at process models, where we do not find that agile facilitates early changes to understanding. We conclude that continuous product development seems to cater for changed benefits understanding better, but since the way one organizes work will vary depending on a host of factors, specific practices for handling changes to benefits understanding appropriately should be developed that span different ways of organizing work.