When a business case gets approved, the hard work shouldn’t stop, as approval is only the beginning of the journey toward actually realizing value. Yet in many organizations, tracking ROI after the green light is an afterthought; projects move forward, resources get allocated, but no one checks whether the promised returns are ever actually achieved.
That’s a costly mistake, as a business case is not just a sales document for funding; it’s a living benchmark of expected costs, benefits, and risks. Tracking realized ROI after approval ensures accountability, surfaces risks early, and gives decision-makers the feedback loop they need to improve future investments.
So, how should you track ROI effectively once a project is underway?
📏 1. Establish a baseline from the business case
Start with the approved numbers; your business case already outlines expected costs, projected benefits, and target timelines, so these should provide the reference points for all future comparisons.
A common pitfall is allowing the case to drift, because if the original baseline is constantly revised or forgotten, ROI tracking becomes meaningless. You can avoid this by treating the approved case as your “frozen” forecast, against which all realized performance is then measured.
👉 e.g. If a digital transformation project was approved on the promise of $2M in cost savings over three years, the first post-approval checkpoint should measure progress against that figure. Even as circumstances change, having the original baseline to refer back to allows you to understand what was promised versus what was delivered.
📍 2. Define milestones for measurement
Although it would make life a lot easier if it did, unfortunately, ROI doesn’t materialize all at once. Benefits ramp up, adoption spreads, and risks either materialize or fade, which is why you should set checkpoints throughout the project lifecycle. Good practice for this includes:
🚚 At delivery milestones e.g. at the launch of a new system, at go-live of a process change
🕒 At time-based intervals: monthly, quarterly, annually, or aligned with fiscal reporting
📶 At benefit ramp-up points e.g. when adoption is expected to hit 50 percent or 80 percent
Without milestones, organizations risk falling into the trap of only measuring ROI at project closure, and by then, it’s too late to rectify or try to avoid any issues that are identified.
💡 Tip: Avoid setting milestones too infrequently. Particularly at the start of a project, it’s better to err on the side of caution by having reviews too often (which you can then dial down when you decide they are too often) than too rarely, as annual reviews alone often miss critical deviations that show up within months of delivery.
📊 3. Track both costs and benefits
Organizations often default to tracking costs, purely because invoices and budgets are easy to measure. But ROI is a double-sided equation, so it depends just as much on benefits being realized, and that means gathering evidence of efficiency gains, revenue growth, or risk reduction in line with the original case. Good practice for this includes:
🕵 Capture actual costs incurred vs. budgeted spend, including hidden or indirect costs
🗂️ Quantify realized benefits using hard evidence, such as system usage metrics, productivity KPIs, or revenue growth tied to the project
🔗 Link realized benefits back to the owner who committed to them in the business case
👉 e.g. For a customer service automation project, costs may be straightforward (software licenses, implementation fees, etc). Benefits, however, require measurement: fewer inbound calls, faster resolution times, and higher customer satisfaction scores.
🔍 4. Investigate variances, don’t just record them
Tracking ROI is not about creating a static report. It’s about understanding why actuals differ from forecasts. To do this you can ask questions like:
Were assumptions too optimistic?
Did external factors (market shifts, regulation changes, supply chain issues, etc) impact results?
Is adoption lower than expected, and if so, why?
Did risk mitigations work as intended?
The key is not to punish variance but to learn from it, as post-approval analysis prevents organizations from repeating the same forecasting mistakes on their next project.
👉 e.g. If a project delivers its cost savings six months late because adoption lagged, capturing that insight helps future projects build more realistic adoption curves.
🤝 5. Maintain accountability and transparency
ROI tracking only works when ownership is clear. Each benefit should have a named stakeholder responsible for delivering and reporting on it, as without accountability, benefits get lost in the noise of daily operations. A common mistake is allowing benefits to be “owned by everyone”, as in reality that means it's actually owned by no one.
Transparency is no less important, so publishing progress updates (even when targets are missed) builds trust with leadership and encourages honest course correction.
💡 Tip: Tie benefit ownership into performance objectives for managers and teams, as this creates a direct incentive to ensure that benefits are both realized and reported.
🔁 6. Build a feedback loop into decision-making
The real value of ROI tracking isn’t just proving whether a single project in isolation succeeded; it’s feeding those insights, along with insights on a whole range of other projects, back into the broader investment process. Over time, a portfolio of post-approval data helps answer strategic questions:
Are certain types of projects consistently overestimated?
Which business units deliver on ROI most reliably?
How accurate are forecasts for adoption, ramp-up, and external dependencies?
Organizations that treat ROI tracking as a feedback loop improve their ability to make smarter bets in the future.
ℹ️ Read more about this in Corporate Amnesia: Why organizations keep repeating the same mistakes
🛠️ 7. Use tools to reduce friction
Spreadsheets make ROI tracking painful, and as a result, it rarely gets done consistently, and even when it is, it tends to be done badly. Specialized tools can embed ROI tracking into the project lifecycle and remove friction. With KangaROI, for example, teams can:
Take automatic ROI Snapshots at each milestone
Run Check-Ins to compare actuals against forecasts and learn the Real ROI
Model adoption curves and benefit ramping in advance, then validate them with real-world data
Track risk-adjusted ROI as risks evolve
By making ROI tracking seamless, organizations increase consistency and create a robust dataset of realized outcomes, which they can then use to strengthen their future business cases.
The bottom line
A business case should not gather dust after approval; by treating it as a living document and tracking realized ROI at regular checkpoints, organizations turn forecasts into accountability.
Done well, post-approval tracking delivers two big wins. First, it proves whether projects actually deliver on their promises. Second, it creates a feedback loop that improves the quality of forecasting and decision-making for every future investment.
ROI tracking isn’t about looking back with blame; it’s about looking forward with better evidence.
