For many organisations, benefits management and evaluation exist as parallel disciplines. Both are trying to answer remarkably similar questions, what difference are we making, how do we know, and are we achieving the outcomes we promised? Yet they are often managed separately, with different meetings, different stakeholders, different artefacts and, ultimately, different answers.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) Decided to Challenge That Approach
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At a recent Wellingtone Community event, Rachel Huitson-Bonde and Vickie Whitelegg shared how ONS embedded an integrated approach called BenEval (Benefits Evaluation Evolution), bringing benefits management and evaluation together into one process, one conversation and one evidence base. What began as a small experiment has evolved into a standard way of working across major programmes.
Why Did ONS Need to Change Its Benefits and Evaluation Approach?
Benefits and evaluation teams were often meeting the same stakeholders, asking similar questions and collecting overlapping information. Business areas found themselves attending multiple meetings each month, while benefits and evaluation specialists spent additional time reconciling findings afterwards.
This created:
- Unnecessary burden on delivery teams
- Duplication of effort
- Opportunities for inconsistency and misunderstanding
- Multiple versions of documents and competing sources of truth
- Benefits conversations occurring too late in the lifecycle
ONS recognised that both disciplines relied on the same foundation: evidence. Rather than managing them separately, they asked a fundamental question:
What if benefits management and evaluation became one integrated process?
What Is the BenEval Approach?
At its heart, BenEval combines the strengths of both disciplines, helping teams to answer some key questions:
| Benefits | Evaluation | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions answered | What benefits are we expecting? How will we realise them? Who owns them? How will success be measured? | Did those outcomes occur? Why did they occur? What worked? What didn’t? Was the investment worthwhile? |
By bringing these together, ONS created a shared framework where benefits define success and evaluation provides the evidence to demonstrate whether that success is actually happening.
Instead of treating benefits as a post-project exercise, the organisation embeds benefits thinking throughout delivery.
Three Key Innovations
| Innovation | Before BenEval | After BenEval |
|---|---|---|
| Meetings | Separate benefits and evaluation meetings with the same stakeholders | One joint meeting |
| Theory of change | Two separate two hour workshops, then a plenary to reconcile them | One combined Theory of Change and Benefits workshop |
| Documentation | Evaluation plan, benefits management approach and realisation plan as separate documents | Single Benefits Monitoring Plan (small projects) or BMARP workbook (larger programmes) |
- One Meeting Instead of Two
Previously, evaluation and benefits teams met stakeholders separately, now, conversations happen together.
This has reduced duplication, improved consistency and significantly reduced demand on busy programme teams. It also means issues, assumptions and emerging insights are discussed collectively rather than being rediscovered later.
- Theory of Change at the Centre
One of the most powerful changes was the introduction of a combined Theory of Change and Benefits workshop.
A Theory of Change maps:
- The problem being solved
- Activities being undertaken
- Outputs being produced
- Expected outcomes
- Intended impact
By embedding benefits directly into this process, benefits become naturally linked to the activities and outcomes they are intended to create. Teams can also identify aspects of change such as risks, assumptions, and stakeholder impacts all in one place.
As Rachel noted, many business cases now effectively “write themselves” because the strategic logic has already been established.
- Simplified Documentation
ONS found substantial duplication across evaluation plans, benefits realisation plans, trackers and supporting documentation.
Rather than requiring multiple documents, they condensed requirements into a streamlined set of artefacts.
Benefits, evaluation evidence and monitoring information are now managed through a much simpler structure with clearer ownership and better version control.
In practice, this means smaller projects now complete a single Benefits Monitoring Plan, while larger programmes use the BMARP (Benefits Management Approach and Realisation Plan), one Excel workbook that replaced three separate documents and is now used across all major ONS programmes.
What Are the Benefits of Integrating Benefits Management and Evaluation?
While efficiencies were important, the real gains were much broader.
Better Evidence
The integration of evaluation methods created a more robust evidence base for benefits claims.
Instead of relying on assumptions or estimated financial values, programmes can demonstrate measurable outcomes with greater confidence.
Reduced Administrative Burden
Stakeholders spend less time repeating information and attending duplicate meetings, and benefits and evaluation teams spend less time reconciling differing interpretations.
Stronger Strategic Alignment
Benefits are now identified through theory of change workshops and linked directly to strategic objectives, programme outcomes and business cases.
Improved Learning
Evaluation is no longer something that happens after delivery, instead, programmes gather evidence throughout the lifecycle, allowing teams to adapt, refine and improve while work is still underway.
Cultural Change
Perhaps most importantly, BenEval has created a stronger culture of benefits ownership through communities of practice, special interest groups and learning programmes, ONS has increased capability and confidence across the organisation.
As Rachel put it on the day, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, which is why ONS invested as much in communities of practice, informal learning and its benefits practitioner network as in the process itself.
Recognised Beyond ONS
ONS’s approach hasn’t gone unnoticed elsewhere in government. Their Access for Action case study (formerly the Pandemic Preparedness Toolkit) was used as an exemplar when the Green Book was rewritten, and has since received positive feedback from Dr Fiona Spencer, co-author of the Teal Book. ONS has shared its approach with departments including the Ministry of Justice, HM Prison and Probation Service and DEFRA, while drawing on the fuller integration already in place at UKHSA and the partial integration adopted by the Department for Transport.
Practical Takeaways for PMOs and Change Leaders
Whether you’re in the public or private sector, there are several lessons worth taking from the ONS experience.
| Takeaway | What ONS did | Try this first |
|---|---|---|
| Start Small | Piloted the approach with a handful of projects rather than a wholesale transformation, then learned and refined as they went. | Treated every phase as a chance to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, rather than planning the whole journey upfront. |
| Focus on Evidence, Not Just Numbers | Moved away from the ‘magic number’ towards percentage uplifts and narrative outcomes backed by evaluation evidence. | On your next business case, write the benefit as a narrative or a percentage change before you go looking for a monetary value. |
| Integrate Early | Made the Theory of Change and Benefits workshop the very first step, before the business case is drafted. | Get your benefits owner into the room at the business case stage, not after it’s already been signed off. |
| Create Communities | Built a benefits Special Interest Group and a practitioners’ group that meets every fortnight, alongside an evaluation month and an investment bootcamp. | Start a fortnightly informal drop in or SIG. ONS’s began small and grew from there. |
| Adapt, Don’t Adopt | Took ideas from UKHSA and the Department for Transport, then tightened them to fit ONS rather than copying either wholesale. | Take a template from elsewhere (there’s one later in this article) and change at least one thing to fit your organisation before rolling it out. |
| Keep Reviewing | Treated every phase as a chance to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, rather than planning the whole journey upfront. | Build a short ‘what worked, what didn’t’ retro into the end of every phase, don’t wait for a full project retrospective. |
Final Thought
The ONS BenEval journey demonstrates a simple but powerful truth: organisations do not need more processes, they need better connected ones.
By integrating benefits management and evaluation, ONS has reduced duplication, strengthened evidence, improved learning and created a clearer line of sight between investment, delivery and outcomes.
What’s Next for ONS’s BenEval Journey?
BenEval is still evolving. ONS is developing a Benefits Portal to replace the current Excel and Word based tracking with a more automated, central system, reducing the manual burden of feeding data in. They’re also working to build senior level sponsorship by recruiting a small number of BenEval ambassadors from the Senior Civil Service, recognising that while adoption has been strong at working level, visibility and advocacy at the top has lagged behind.
