A capital project has two finishing lines, and most organisations watch only the first. The first is completion: the asset is built, commissioned and handed over, and the project team disbands. The second is the point at which the asset does what the investment case promised, whether that means carrying passengers, processing volumes, serving patients or earning the returns that justified the capital. The distance between the two is where a great deal of project value is quietly lost.
The question for boards and executive teams is therefore not only whether a project was delivered, but what turns a completed project into a productive asset, and who is accountable for making that happen. Our answer is that value realisation must be managed as a distinct phase of the project life, with its own owner, budget, measures and reviews. It begins before handover, with operational readiness, and continues for years afterwards through benefits realisation, asset utilisation and honest evaluation. Where accountability lapses at completion, nobody is left to answer for the outcome the organisation paid for.
The UK National Audit Office (NAO) has put the problem plainly: its work found that “government does not routinely look at what happens after major projects are completed” (NAO, Delivering value from government investment in major projects, 2024). The finding concerns one government, but the pattern, intense scrutiny up to handover and much less afterwards, is a risk for any organisation whose governance is built around approval and delivery.
In brief
- Completion measures outputs. Value is measured in outcomes, which usually arrive after handover and sometimes years later.
- Operational readiness, meaning people, processes, systems and an owner prepared to run the asset, decides how quickly a finished project starts to pay back.
- Benefits need a named owner in the operating business before the investment is approved, still reporting to the approving body after the project team has gone.
- Utilisation and time to value connect a project to enterprise performance. An asset that works but runs below the capacity paid for is capital without a full return.
- Evaluation after completion is the only way to learn whether benefits forecasts were credible, and it is where many organisations are weakest.
Why completion is the wrong finishing line
Heathrow Terminal 5 remains one of the clearest public illustrations. BAA opened the terminal on 27 March 2008 after six years of construction, at a cost of £4.3 billion, on time and within budget. On the first day of operation alone, 36,584 passengers were caught up in the problems that followed; the baggage system failed, and British Airways reported that 23,205 bags had to be sorted manually. The House of Commons Transport Committee traced most of the problems to two factors: insufficient communication between owner and operator, and poor staff training and system testing (House of Commons Transport Committee, The Opening of Heathrow Terminal 5, 2008). By the conventional measures of project delivery, the terminal was a success. As an operating asset on its first day, it was not.
The same gap appears at portfolio scale. When the NAO followed up projects that had left the UK Government Major Projects Portfolio, it found that 34 of the 48 it examined had delivered their intended outputs, but that it was less clear whether projects were achieving their intended outcomes. The portfolio was intended to produce around £650 billion of benefits, with no corresponding figure for benefits actually realised, and 176 of the 302 projects that left it between April 2011 and September 2017, or 58%, did so without any form of exit review (NAO, Projects leaving the Government Major Projects Portfolio, 2018).
The NAO’s 2024 lessons-learned report draws the conclusion that matters for executives. Delivering to budget and schedule is an important part of value for money, but whether a project represents value for money is ultimately determined by whether the value it produces justifies its cost. That value, the report adds, is generated by how organisations and stakeholders adopt and use what a project delivers (NAO, 2024).
Four stages, two of them neglected
The journey from capital to value runs through four stages: finance, build, operate and generate value. Governance is usually heaviest in the first two. Investment committees scrutinise the business case; project boards and controls teams scrutinise cost, schedule and scope. The last two stages, where the value sits, typically receive fewer reviews and less executive attention.
| Stage | The question it answers | Typical measures | Usual owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finance | Is this worth funding, and on what terms? | Business case, affordability, cost of capital | Investment committee, finance director, sponsor |
| Build | Is the asset being delivered as approved? | Cost, schedule, scope, quality, safety | Project director, senior responsible owner |
| Operate | Does the asset work reliably in service? | Availability, throughput, service levels, operating cost | Operations director, asset manager |
| Generate value | Is the organisation getting the outcomes it paid for? | Realised benefits, utilisation, returns, time to value | Business owner, benefit owners, executive team |
The difficulty lies in the handoffs. Each stage tends to have a different owner, and each change of owner is often a change of measure, budget and reporting line. A project director measured on cost and schedule has little incentive to protect benefits that arrive after they have moved on; an operations director has little reason to own a benefits case they did not write. In our reading, value realisation is largely the discipline of connecting these columns, so that the question asked at the finance stage is still being answered at the value stage.
Asset management is the natural home for the last two stages. ISO 55000:2024, the international standard on asset management vocabulary and principles, frames the discipline as managing assets across their life cycles to enhance the value realised from them (ISO, 2024). A project should therefore hand over more than a physical asset: it should hand over what the asset needs to generate value, including operating data, a maintenance regime, spares, performance targets and an operating budget agreed when the capital was approved.
Operational readiness: where build becomes operate
Operational readiness is the hinge between building and operating, and it deserves its own decision point. The UK’s gateway process provides one. The Gate 4 review, readiness for service, is designed to confirm that all necessary testing has been done, including commissioning of buildings, business integration and user acceptance testing; that arrangements are in place for handover from the senior responsible owner to the operational business owner; and that the originally projected business benefit is still likely to be achieved (NISTA, Gate Review 4, 2026).
The UK’s aircraft carrier programme shows a subtler version of the problem. By 2020 the Ministry of Defence had received two new carriers into service, delivered for £6.4 billion, just 3% above the revised figure announced to Parliament in 2013. Yet the NAO found slower progress on the supporting activities needed to make full use of a carrier strike group: the Crowsnest airborne radar was 18 months late, and only one ship was able to resupply a carrier group. It concluded that the department would not achieve value for money from its investment to date unless it clarified its future ambitions, understood future development and operating costs, and improved coordination across commands (NAO, Carrier Strike – Preparing for deployment, 2020). The ships were delivered. The capability, which is what the capital was for, depended on everything around them.
Readiness therefore covers far more than commissioning. In practice it includes:
- an operator involved in design and commissioning, not introduced at handover;
- people recruited, trained and rehearsed on the real systems under realistic load;
- integrated testing with the processes, IT systems and suppliers around the asset;
- enabling investments, such as connections and supporting systems, funded and scheduled alongside the core asset;
- an operating budget, maintenance regime and benefits baseline approved with the capital, not after it.
The NAO’s lessons point the same way: prepare for handover early and keep operators involved throughout, so that the transition to business as usual is planned rather than improvised (NAO, 2024). Because commissioning, trial operations and handover sit on the critical path, readiness belongs inside project controls and delivery, with the same schedule discipline and contingency as construction.
Benefits realisation: an owner who outlasts the project
UK government guidance published in July 2026 defines a benefit as a positive, measurable effect of change as seen by one or more stakeholders. Some benefits appear during the work; others arrive at the end or over many years as new services and assets are used. The guidance places benefit owners in operations, where they can track progress over the longer term on behalf of the sponsoring organisation (Government Project Delivery, Quick guide to benefits management in government, 2026).
The UK’s functional standard for project delivery makes the senior responsible owner accountable for delivering the required outcomes and realising the required benefits, and expects that when a project closes, responsibility for ongoing benefit tracking is handed over to, and accepted by, the appropriate business authority (GovS 002, 2025).
The weak point is acceptance. The NAO found in 2018 that departments reported expected benefits to oversight groups such as investment committees while projects were in progress. Once projects were delivered, responsibility for monitoring benefits passed to the relevant part of the business, and reporting to those oversight groups ceased (NAO, 2018). That is the accountability gap in a sentence: the body that approved the capital stops seeing the evidence of whether it was well spent.
The gateway process offers a remedy if it is used. The Gate 5 review, covering operations and benefits realisation, is designed to be repeated through the life of the service: typically as the project is about to hand over, again six to 12 months after handover, and shortly before the end of a service contract. Handover from the senior responsible owner to the operational business owner typically occurs within a year of the start of operations, after which the business owner is responsible for ensuring the expected benefits are delivered (NISTA, Gate Review 5, 2026).
There is also a statistical reason to keep looking. Bent Flyvbjerg’s overview of megaproject research reports that benefit shortfalls of up to 50% are common, and above 50% not uncommon, with no sign of improvement over time or across geographies (Flyvbjerg, What You Should Know About Megaprojects and Why, 2014). A benefits case at approval is a forecast to be tested, not a result to be banked. Why forecasts drift is examined in our brief on decisions made before construction; the point here is that only measurement after completion reveals the drift, and only named owners can respond to it.
Utilisation and time to value
An asset that works is not necessarily productive. Utilisation, the extent to which the capacity paid for is actually used, turns an engineering success into an economic one, and it is often the slowest measure to improve.
The Millennium Dome is the NAO’s example of early benefits falling well below forecasts. To meet its revenue projections it needed more than 12 million paying visitors in its year of operation; it achieved less than half of that. Its eventual value came from a different use, after the government broadened the range of potential commercial uses and sold it to AEG, which operates it as The O2. By contrast, the NAO points to Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, where steps to maximise use have widened the value produced, and where demonstrating success through monitoring and evaluation led its funders to approve a successor project (NAO, 2024).
The same report found that realising value required more than completing the project and expecting value to emerge: it took time, investment beyond the original project budget and continued collaboration between public, private and local bodies. On High Speed 1, Ebbsfleet International station has been open since 2007, but regeneration around it was slow, and in 2015 the government established the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation to speed up delivery of 15,000 homes (NAO, 2024).
For executives, the practical metric is time to value: the time between committing capital and the asset delivering its intended benefit at the intended rate. How to measure it alongside cost and schedule is set out in the capital project equation. What matters here is that someone owns the ramp-up curve, the period after handover when throughput, availability and adoption climb towards design levels. In our reading, ramp-up is where finance and operations most often disconnect: the capital budget has closed, and the operating budget assumed steady-state performance from the first day.
Post-project accountability: who answers for value five years on
Accountability after completion depends on evidence, and evidence depends on evaluation being designed in. HM Treasury’s Magenta Book states that evaluation should be built into an intervention’s design and delivery from the earliest stages (HM Treasury, The Magenta Book, 2026). Practice has lagged. In a 2019 assessment reported by the NAO, the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit found that only nine of the government’s 108 major projects, representing 8% of £432 billion of spending, were evaluated robustly, while 77, representing 64% of spending, had no evaluation arrangements (NAO, Evaluating government spending, 2021).
There are signs of change. The National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority’s 2025–26 annual report, for a portfolio whose monetised benefits run to hundreds of billions of pounds, commits to ensuring that every project leaving the portfolio has an exit review, or equivalent, that considers the ongoing tracking of benefits (NISTA, Major Projects Annual Report 2025-26, 2026).
Structures matter too. The UK government and the Greater London Authority set up the Olympic Park Legacy Company in 2009, later the London Legacy Development Corporation, with a budget and planning powers to develop the park after the 2012 Games; the NAO suggests that in some cases an organisation outside the delivery team may be better placed to take accountability for value (NAO, 2024). In a company the equivalent is simpler: a business unit that has written the benefits into its own plan and budget, and a post-investment review reporting to the committee that approved the capital. Capital spending appears in the accounts whether or not the asset performs; the returns appear only if it does.
What senior executives should change
- Approve the operating model with the capital. Fund the operating budget, staffing, maintenance and enabling investments the asset needs, or treat the benefits case as incomplete.
- Name benefit owners in the operating business before approval. Benefits that belong to nobody in operations tend to be recorded but not realised.
- Treat readiness as a delivery milestone. Schedule integrated testing, operator training and trial operations, and do not declare completion until the operator has accepted the asset.
- Keep the approving body’s line of sight. Require post-investment reviews at handover, six to 12 months later and at planned steady state, reporting to the body that approved the funding.
- Measure utilisation and time to value, not only availability. An asset that is available but under-used is a capital allocation problem, not an engineering one.
- Feed results back into approvals. Realised benefits from completed projects are the most credible reference point for judging the next benefits case.
How value realisation connects across the disciplines
Value realisation is where the other disciplines are tested. Portfolio leaders need realised-benefit data to rebalance their portfolios; the move from project selection to end-to-end stewardship described in why PPM is moving beyond project selection depends on it. Funding decisions shape the value stage before any asset exists, which is the subject of our brief on connecting capital to projects. For capital projects, the handover interface is where controls, commissioning and asset management meet, a recurring concern for leaders of capital projects and CAPEX programmes. And in technology and transformation programmes the operate stage is adoption: a system that goes live but is not used has the same problem as a terminal that opens but cannot move bags, which is why benefits ownership sits at the centre of transformation and technology investment.
Prove: the stage that justifies the others
In the language of the project economy, a project moves from Decide to Fund to Deliver to Prove. Most governance systems are built around the first three. Prove is where the benefits case is closed against evidence, the asset’s contribution to enterprise performance is measured, and the lessons return to the next decision. Project Economy Forum’s Dubai edition, on 27–28 January 2027, gives its second day to that journey, following a project from first decision to final proof.
Conclusion: redefine “complete”
The most useful change many organisations could make is partly one of definition. Record practical completion at handover, by all means, but reserve the word “complete” for the moment the benefits case has been tested against operating evidence and formally closed, as realised, partly realised or explained. That single shift moves accountability to where the value is, gives readiness and evaluation the status they lack, and turns the last gate of every project into the first evidence for the next investment decision.
Frequently asked questions
What is project value realisation?
It is the work of turning a completed project into the outcomes that justified the investment: preparing operations before handover, assigning benefit owners, ramping the asset up to full use, and measuring and evaluating the results over time.
How does benefits realisation differ from project delivery?
Delivery produces outputs, such as a building, a system or a railway line. Benefits realisation concerns outcomes, the measurable improvements those outputs are meant to produce, which often arrive after the project has closed.
Who is accountable for benefits after a project closes?
In UK government practice, the senior responsible owner is accountable during the project, and responsibility passes to an operational business owner and named benefit owners after handover. The model works in any organisation, but only if the body that approved the investment keeps receiving reports.
Sources
- House of Commons Transport Committee, The Opening of Heathrow Terminal 5 (2008). UK Parliament
- National Audit Office, Projects leaving the Government Major Projects Portfolio (2018). NAO
- National Audit Office, Lessons learned: Delivering value from government investment in major projects (2024). NAO
- National Audit Office, Carrier Strike – Preparing for deployment (2020). NAO summary
- National Audit Office, Evaluating government spending (2021). NAO
- Government Project Delivery, Quick guide to benefits management in government (2026). Government Project Delivery
- Government Project Delivery, Government Functional Standard GovS 002: Project delivery (2025). Government Project Delivery
- National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, Gate Review 4: Readiness for Service (2026). GOV.UK
- National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, Gate Review 5: Operational Review and Benefits Realisation (2026). GOV.UK
- National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, NISTA Major Projects Annual Report 2025-26 (2026). GOV.UK
- HM Treasury, The Magenta Book (2026). GOV.UK
- International Organization for Standardization, ISO 55000:2024 Asset management — Vocabulary, overview and principles (2024). ISO
- Bent Flyvbjerg, Project Management Journal, What You Should Know About Megaprojects and Why: An Overview (2014). arXiv preprint