Index:
What is a Business Case?
A business case is different from business plan. A business plan details your strategy for a new business venture. A business case is a document that explains reasons for investment or sponsorship for a project within a business organisation.
You should have already have conducted analysis and other activities such as market research, customer feedback, industry analysis and other data. Your business case presents your findings in order to gain investment or sponsorship. For example based on your analysis and research you may have found a problem within a particular department of an organisation, and you need investment or sponsorship in order to fund the proposed solution.
The business case is a document used to sell the benefits of your business opportunity or project to potential investors/ sponsors so that they can make a decision. You will therefore write your business case as a sales pitch. You should focus on the benefits and get your investors or sponsors to understand the scale of the opportunity or size of the problem you are trying to fix before you mention the features and costings.
The Business Case Is A Living Document.
The business case should not be set aside once you have presented it to your investors or sponsors. You will need to review and possibly revise it as you move through your project or business venture.
You will need to be aware of changes within your industry and the business environments they operate in order to revise your business case so that your proposal stays relevant.
Your first draft of your business case would have been written based on the results of a feasibility study. This is where you would have looked at high level requirements (requirements that aren't as detailed), and drafted rough estimates of costs. The rough cost estimates will need to be revisited once detailed analysis is conducted and a detailed break down of the proposed solution is revealed.
For example at the start of writing your business case you knew the rough costs would be about £120,000. Once further analysis has been conducted you now know that FTE (full time employee) costs are £37,726.26, costs of integrations of interfaces and other systems will be £27,567.73 and contractor fees will be about £55,654.98. In this example you would change your rough estimate of £120,00 to the more specific figure of £120,948.97.
You should review your business case again before you plan to launch your proposed solution in order to review the true costs of launching/ deploying the solution.
You will then review your business case once again when you have launched your solution so that you can review the true benefits against what you originally predicted. You will then need to ensure that these benefits are realised by the solution.
Business Case Structure
Just KISS (Keep It Smart and Simple). Remember the business case is a living document, so you should be reviewing it as your project progresses. Therefore keep your business case easy to understand and concise when you initially present it to investors/ sponsors.
You should structure your business case as follows.
Introduction.
Why have you written the business case? (why is the project needed; brief outline).
Scope. Which departments and systems will be affected?
How have you examined the business issue/ opportunity?
Who contributed to the analysis and research?
Management Summary.
Sponsors and investors will pay more attention to this section, so this needs to be more detailed. Write the management summary after you have completed the rest of the business case.
Consider these points.
Specifics regarding what studies you conducted and what was revealed about the issue you are trying to resolve/ opportunity you are seeking.
All the options you considered with explanations of the pros and cons against each one.
A clear statement of your recommendation and the decision you require.
Description Of The Current State.
Keep this section short. It's possible you have outlined the current situation in your introduction. Investors/ sponsors don't want to re-read what what has already been described or have what they already know explained to them again on paper.
Describe what the current state of the situation is by outlining the key problems and where the opportunities are for change. e.g. "Today our customer service staff have to input customers shipping details manually. Therefore we need a way to automate this task so that our customer service staff can focus on answering customer queries."
Possible Options Considered.
Why have you rejected the other options (what's so good about the solution you're proposing compared to the other options available). E.g. "Software ABC does not have the ability to manually change shipping details once the data has pulled through automatically. Software XYZ allows us to make manual amendments and enables manual override in order to change customers shipping details".
Benefits and Costs Analysis.
Remember to outline the benefits before the costs. The feasibility of the benefits and costs should be analysed based on the scope of the project. The solution may have many benefits however stick to the scope of your project, otherwise you will end up with a solution that will become incredibly infeasible.
Tangible = You can usually assign a monetary value
Intangible = You cannot at this stage.
Tangible Benefits: e.g. "Reduced errors in shipping details, means we will not have to reship customer items due to human error saving us £20,000 per year."
Intangible Benefits: e.g. "Improved customer satisfaction rates as customers will receive their items on time."
Tangible Costs: e.g. Staff Training: "3 x Customer Service Managers need to be trained on the new system in order to manually override the automation. This will require 3 days training requiring 30 days for development for the course. This is an estimated FTE of £2000."
Intangible Costs. e.g. "Possible initial disruption once the new system is implemented"
Impact Assessment.
Consider what may happen as a result of the change. These usually are assumptions, however you need to display that you have considered the impacts too, for example;
Management style
Operating model
Ways of working
Departments that will be indirectly affected
Staff turn over and recruitment.
Risk Assessment.
For each risk you should include:
A description of the risk
Impact assessment (what would the scale of the damage be?).
Probability: How likely is the risk; categorise by High , Medium and Low.
Countermeasures: What can we do to reduce the likelihood of the risk happening.
Ownership: For each risk assign who would be best to execute the countermeasures
Recommendations.
Summarise the business case and clarify what your investors/ sponsors are being asked to sign off.
Create a project time scale chart depicting each stage that needs to be completed across the length of time each stage will take to complete.
Appendices.
Add any other detailed information within this section. This separates it from the main points of the business case. Include in here for example detailed system processes.
Detailed cost-benefit calculations
Statistics
Surveys and questionnaires.