Managing Information on Goals and Benefits During Development Initiatives

The main reason for initiating a software development initiative is to produce value for stakeholders. However, software projects vary in their degrees of success in delivering the intended value. Since software projects can consume a significant amount of resources, a lack of focus on delivering value can result in bad investments. Research suggests that the absence of frameworks and techniques to support organizations in benefits management activities may be the reason for the lack of focus on value creation in daily development life. To increase the motivation for, and the focus on, benefits management, we implemented a generalized version of a set of published benefit estimation and tracking techniques so that they are accessible in an extensively used development management platform (Jira). The techniques are for declaring goals and goal structures and for expressing estimates of the system’s contribution to the goals. The usability of the system was tested with IT professionals, the preliminary results are promising for further development on the present functionality and for other pieces of benefits management functionality in the future.