Accelerating time to impact: Deconstructing practices to achieve project value

Accelerating time to impact is a serious and important challenge for today's organizations. This paper combines the literatures of project acceleration and benefit management to inquire into the possibilities of accelerating time to impact. Specifically, it explores a practitioner-driven Danish initiative targeted at increasing the speed at which project benefits are attained, and it analyzes why some projects were able to achieve benefits faster than others. The initiative functions as a major social experiment, where the same project methodology was implemented in several Danish project-based organizations. We analyze five of these organizations. We identified reasons for the differences and grouped them in a conceptual model: the ‘house of time to impact’ with three areas: valuing speed, owning speed and entraining speed in the organization. The paper's contribution is the bridge between the literatures on benefit and time management, bringing two pressing issues together. The contribution to practice lies in the considerations and stories of other organizations attempting to reconcile the increasing need for effectiveness.