@misc{16749,
  keywords = {Cost, Benefits management challenges, Time, Scope, Benefit, Software project severity},
  author = {Sinan Tanilkan and Jo Hannay and Davide Taibi and Marco Kuhrmann and Tommi Mikkonen and Jil Kl{\"u}nder and Pekka Abrahamsson},
  title = {Benefit Considerations in Project Decisions},
  abstract = {Software project success is often characterized in terms of time, cost and scope {\textendash} despite that delivering benefit is the main purpose of a project. In this paper, we explore 1) to what degree benefit considerations influence major project decisions, 2) to what degree a specific set of benefits management challenge are handled and influence major project decisions and 3) if there is any realization (over time) that benefit considerations should receive greater attention. We investigate influence in projects with four types of problem severity: completed projects with only minor problems, completed projects with major problems, projects that were disrupted but completed, and projects that were terminated before completion. We asked 45 software professionals to what degree time, cost, scope, benefit and benefit/cost, as well as benefits management challenges, influence major  roject decisions. Our findings indicate that time, cost and scope have a significantly higher degree of influence on project decisions than benefit and benefit/cost. However, practitioners think that benefit and benefit/cost should have significantly more influence on decisions than cost. The benefits management challenges are found to have less influence in the more severe projects. We argue that giving benefits considerations a stronger voice in project decisions would be in line with the desire of practitioners and the prime objective of delivering benefit to stakeholders. We conclude that it is important to understand how to handle benefits management challenges at different stages of project life and that handling such challenges should be integrated with other prime drivers of project success.},
  year = {2022},
  journal = {International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2022},
  edition = {23},
  pages = {217-234},
  month = {11/2022},
  publisher = {Springer, Cham},
  isbn = {978-3-031-21388-5},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21388-5_15},
}