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.

Introduction

This research bridges two fundamental yet disjoined challenges in managing projects: the persistent need for quick results (Ellwood et al., 2017) and the emerging focus on delivery of value as opposed to project output (Winter et al., 2006). We live in an accelerating society (Rosa, 2013) and experience an increasing pressure to deliver more, better and quicker. Projects’ intrinsic relationship with time makes them an important vehicle for speeding (Ellwood et al., 2017). Ever since its emergence in the 1950s, project management has encompassed a myriad of classic practices to accelerate project delivery, such as PERT, critical path and the possibility to ‘crash’ schedules (Zirger and Hartley, 1994; Ellwood et al., 2017). While the field of project studies has dedicated only little attention to acceleration of projects (Padalkar and Gopinath, 2016), the topic is empirically and theoretically studied in the literature on new product development (NPD). However, this body of literature focuses on accelerating the creation of new products, not on the benefits that these products are envisioned to create.