Outsourcing Benefits Realisation Plan
This is a practical guide to building a benefits realisation plan for an outsourcing project — how the project’s benefits will be measured and actually realised, adapted to the realities of outsourcing a function to an external provider.
What a Benefits Realisation Plan is
A benefits realisation plan is how the project’s benefits will be measured and actually realised. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Benefits Realization. On an outsourcing project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for an Outsourcing project
Outsourcing projects live or die on outsourcing a function to an external provider. A well-built benefits realisation plan gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how outsourcing projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- Target benefits
- Metrics / KPIs
- Baseline values
- Owner
- Realisation timeline
Outsourcing-specific considerations
Tailor the benefits realisation plan to the risks that most often derail outsourcing projects:
- Knowledge transfer
- Service-level definition
- People impact
Example
On a real outsourcing project, the benefits realisation plan would be shaped by outsourcing a function to an external provider. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — knowledge transfer, service-level definition, people impact — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.