Accelerating Time to Benefit: Deconstructing Innovative Organizational Practices in Five Projects

Despite the ubiquitous pressure for speed, our approaches to accelerate projects remain constrained to the old-fashioned understanding of the project as a vehicle to deliver products and services, not value. This article explores an attempt to accelerate time to benefit. We describe and deconstruct the implementation of a large intervention undertaken in five project-based organizations in Denmark – the Project Half Double where the same project methodology has been applied in five projects, each of them in five distinct organizations in Denmark, as a bold attempt to realize double the benefit in half of the time. Although all cases valued speed and speed to benefit, and implemented most practices proposed by the methodology, only three of the five projects were more successful in decreasing time to speed. Based on a multi-case study comparison between these five different projects and their respective organizations, we propose five complementary explanations for the different results.