Certified: The ISACA CGEIT Audio Course

In this episode, we are going to separate two ideas that beginners often blend together without realizing it: delivering something and creating value. It feels natural to assume that if a project is delivered on time and within budget, the organization must have succeeded, because delivery is visible and easy to celebrate. Governance, however, cares about whether the enterprise actually received the benefits that justified the investment in the first place. That is why benefit evaluation must focus on realized value, meaning the improvements that show up in real operations, real outcomes, and real performance measures after the work is in use. This shift is important because organizations can become very good at finishing projects while staying bad at improving results. By the end of this lesson, you should be able to explain what benefits really are, why delivery measures can mislead leaders, and how to evaluate benefits in a way that reflects reality instead of optimistic assumptions.

Before we continue, a quick note: this audio course is a companion to our course companion books. The first book is about the exam and provides detailed information on how to pass it best. The second book is a Kindle-only eBook that contains 1,000 flashcards that can be used on your mobile device or Kindle. Check them both out at Cyber Author dot me, in the Bare Metal Study Guides Series.

A benefit is a positive change the enterprise experiences because an investment enabled a new capability or improved an existing one. Benefits can be financial, such as increased revenue or reduced operating costs, but they can also be non-financial, such as improved customer trust, reduced risk exposure, faster cycle times, or higher service reliability. The key point is that a benefit is not the same as a deliverable, because a deliverable is something produced while a benefit is something achieved. A new system, a new policy, or a migrated platform is a deliverable, and it may or may not produce a benefit depending on whether it is adopted and whether it changes outcomes. Beginners often confuse these because deliverables are concrete and benefits can feel abstract, but benefits become concrete when they are defined with measurable outcomes. If you define benefits in measurable terms, you can evaluate them later using evidence rather than opinions.

The first reason organizations miss realized value is that many evaluations stop at the finish line, which is usually the moment the project is delivered. Delivery-based evaluation focuses on whether the team completed planned scope, met the schedule, stayed within budget, and passed acceptance testing. Those items matter, because poor delivery can waste money and damage trust, but they do not prove that the enterprise got what it wanted. A project can be delivered perfectly and still fail to produce value if people do not use it, if processes do not change, or if the problem the project was meant to solve was misunderstood. In governance terms, delivery metrics are necessary but not sufficient. Realized value requires that the organization sees improvements in the performance measures that motivated the investment, and that often takes time after delivery.

To evaluate realized value, you need a clear benefits statement that includes a baseline and a target, because value is a change over time. If the benefit is fewer incidents, you need the current incident frequency and severity distribution, then you need a target reduction, and you need a time frame for when the reduction should appear. If the benefit is faster customer onboarding, you need the current onboarding duration and the desired duration after change. Without these, the evaluation turns into vague conversations like it feels better now or it seems faster, which are not reliable and can be influenced by what people want to believe. Baselines also prevent a subtle trick where improvements are claimed without evidence, because memory is not a measurement system. Governance expects that benefits can be demonstrated, and baselines are the starting point for demonstration.

Realized value evaluation also requires separating outputs, outcomes, and impact, because these words are often used loosely. Outputs are what the investment produces, like a new capability or service improvement. Outcomes are the measurable changes in performance, like reduced error rates or improved availability. Impact is the broader effect on enterprise goals, like improved customer retention or higher revenue, which may be influenced by many factors beyond I T. A benefits method that captures realized value pays attention to outcomes first because outcomes are closest to what the investment actually changed. Impact measures are useful but can be difficult to attribute, so they should be handled carefully and honestly. If a team claims revenue increased because of a new system, but marketing also ran a major campaign, attribution becomes murky. Governance does not demand perfect attribution, but it does demand transparent reasoning about what the investment plausibly caused and what other factors may have contributed.

A practical method for capturing realized value is to establish a benefits measurement plan before the work starts and then follow it after delivery. That plan answers questions like which metrics represent the benefits, where the data will come from, how frequently it will be measured, and who will own the evaluation. Ownership matters because benefits do not realize themselves; people and processes realize benefits by using the delivered capability. If nobody is responsible for tracking and responding to benefit measures, the organization may never learn whether value arrived, and it may repeat the same mistakes in future investments. For beginners, it helps to think of this as a promise made at the start: we are not only committing to build something, we are committing to check whether it actually helped. That promise is what turns governance from paperwork into learning.

Timing is another essential idea, because realized value often arrives in stages rather than all at once. Right after delivery, you might see early leading indicators, like training completion, adoption rates, or initial reduction in a specific type of failure. The larger outcome benefits may take longer because behavior change and process stabilization take time. If leaders expect immediate full benefits, they may declare failure too early and undermine adoption. If leaders never check benefits later, they may assume success that never occurred. A good benefits evaluation method includes checkpoints at appropriate intervals, such as shortly after launch to confirm adoption and stability, and later to confirm outcome changes and sustained performance. This staged approach matches how real systems change and helps governance remain fair and evidence-based.

Another important piece is recognizing that benefits can erode over time if they are not maintained, which is one reason realized value is a better focus than delivery. A system can be delivered and initially improve performance, but later degrade due to configuration drift, staff turnover, growing demand, or new threats. If evaluation only looks at delivery, the organization never sees the decline, and it may be surprised when problems return. Realized value evaluation treats benefits as something that must be sustained, and it encourages the organization to establish operating practices that keep the improvement in place. This could include regular performance monitoring, periodic reviews of process adherence, and adjustment of controls as the environment changes. The point is not to create endless audits; it is to ensure the enterprise continues to receive the value it paid for.

One of the hardest challenges in benefits evaluation is dealing with intangible or indirect benefits, such as improved trust or reduced risk. These benefits are real, but they are not always easy to measure in a single clean number. A practical approach is to translate intangible benefits into measurable proxies that reflect the underlying change. For example, improved trust might be reflected in fewer customer complaints about outages, higher completion rates of online transactions, or improved satisfaction scores tied to reliability. Reduced risk might be reflected in fewer high severity incidents, reduced exposure counts, improved recovery time performance, or increased compliance with critical control requirements. These proxies are not perfect, but they allow the organization to observe whether the direction of change matches the expected benefit. The key is to be honest about what the proxy represents and to use multiple signals when one signal could be misleading.

A related pitfall is confusing activity with benefit, especially when organizations feel pressure to show success. Completing training is an activity, and it might be an important step toward adoption, but it is not a realized benefit by itself. Deploying new capabilities is an activity, and it may be necessary, but it does not prove outcomes changed. Realized value methods keep the focus on what improved in the enterprise’s daily reality. This does not mean ignoring activities; it means treating activities as inputs and leading indicators rather than as proof of value. When leaders learn to read metrics this way, they become less vulnerable to performance theater, where reports look impressive but outcomes remain flat. That shift is central to governance credibility, because it aligns reporting with enterprise benefit rather than with project storytelling.

To ground this in a simple example, imagine an investment aimed at reducing the time employees wait for access to the systems they need after hiring. Delivery might be a new automated onboarding capability and a revised workflow, and delivery metrics might show it was implemented by a certain date. Realized value evaluation would look at the baseline onboarding time, then track the average and range after adoption, and also watch related outcomes like the number of access-related support requests in the first week of employment. It would account for adoption by measuring how often the new process is actually used and whether managers follow it. If the onboarding time drops but the number of access issues rises, the evaluation would reveal that the process may be faster but less accurate, and governance would have evidence to adjust. That is the difference between delivery success and realized value success, and it is why benefit evaluation methods must reflect real performance.

As we wrap up, remember that governance is not satisfied with a completed project if the enterprise does not experience the promised improvements. Evaluating benefits using methods that capture realized value means defining benefits as measurable changes, establishing baselines and targets, assigning ownership, and checking results over time rather than stopping at delivery. It also means being honest about attribution, using leading and lagging indicators appropriately, and translating intangible benefits into observable signals without pretending they are perfectly measurable. When organizations adopt this approach, they stop rewarding delivery alone and start rewarding outcomes, which drives better decisions and builds trust in investment governance. If you can consistently ask, what changed in real operations because of this investment, you are practicing the core habit that this domain is trying to teach.