IT systems have a high failure rate in Danish local government, and it has gotten a lot of attention from media because a lot of money is wasted with all the failure in IT projects. Resources are wasted on IT systems that are never being properly put to use. Some of the causes for failure can be related to a lack of organisational change that fails to adapt to the newly implemented systems, but failing to involve stakeholders has also proven to be one of the causes for failure.
Today there is a growing trend that organisations are working together on projects in order to create more benefits. They are co-creating benefits. Benefits realisation management is a theory that seeks to ensure realisation of benefits through organisational change and management, thus managing to ensure success from IT projects rather than failure, as is observed in Danish local government. With the shifting trends of organisations now working more together, the theory on benefits realisation management must adapt in order to still ensure benefits. Where it used to manage what is within the organisation, it must now also seek to manage co-creation of benefits between multiple organisations, or stakeholders. This article focuses on how a local government, Aalborg Kommune, uses benefits realisation management in a co-creation context with other stakeholders. This municipality is working on a successful project where they somehow have managed to balance benefits realisation management and co-creation of benefits with external partners. Thusly this article is a case study of a successful project about digging permits, where the project’s practices are investigated in order to identify how co-creation in benefits realisation management can make a project into a success. Interviews and an observation were performed to gather information about the municipality. The project has been running for over thirty years, and all available documentation that was possible to gather is also included in the dataset. The gathered data was qualitatively coded with Nvivo and analysed with a framework by Nielsen et al. (2012) that conceptualises different aspects of benefits realisation management in local government. In addition, the article adds an extra aspect to the framework, in order to gain an insight into how co-creation of benefits are practiced. The article is a contribution to benefits realisation management in Danish local government, and conceptualises the practices of co-creation in benefits realisation management that contribute to the success of IT projects.