Outcome

An outcome is a condition or effect resulting from how that state operates within its context, in relation to something that matters to the organization or its stakeholders.

In plain terms

An outcome is what results from the way an organization works, expressed in terms someone actually cares about: service levels, cost, risk, customer experience, compliance, capacity. It is not the thing that was built. A new system is an output, and a change of state. Shorter handling times, fewer errors, a cost that actually fell: those are outcomes. A change can produce the first without producing the second, and frequently does.

How it works

Outcomes are produced by an organizational state operating in its context. Change the state and the outcomes may change, but not necessarily in the direction or to the degree anyone expected, and not only in the ways anyone looked at.

An outcome is a condition or effect, not a judgement about it. Whether a particular outcome counts as an improvement depends on comparison: against what the organization produced before, or against what a different arrangement would have produced. The same result can be an improvement in one comparison and a deterioration in another.

Outcomes are not all intended, and they are not all noticed. A change produces the effects it aimed at, effects it did not anticipate, and effects nobody has measured or thought to look for. The unintended ones count. An organization that only examines the outcomes it set out to produce will systematically overstate how well its changes went.

This is where the framework connects to language most people already use. Outputs are what a change produces: the system, the process, the training, the documentation. Outcomes are what changes as a result. Benefits realization is the practice of checking whether the second followed from the first, often long after the change itself has finished. Value is a judgement placed on outcomes, and it depends on whose interests are being weighed.

The reason this framework insists on the distinction is that delivery reporting tends toward outputs and state, because those are visible and countable, while the justification for the change was about outcomes. A project can be complete, on time, within budget and within scope, and have produced no change at all in the thing it existed to change.

Related

• An Organizational state, operating within its context, produces outcomes.
• Intent establishes the intended outcomes a change is pursuing.
• Execution produces the realized state, which produces the realized outcomes.
• Outcome references are the observable evidence used to reason about outcomes in practice: a baseline, targets, and results.
• Outcome validation is the practice of checking what outcomes are actually being produced and what they imply.

Referenced by

• Outcome position