You have a brilliant idea. You want to assemble an expert team and demonstrate to stakeholders that your idea is viable.

But how do you make that work?

Before your plan may be approved, you must explain how you intend to fund and continue your initiative. A business case can help with this.

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Pre-Project Activities

Understanding Business Objective

The first assignment that you worked on as a Business Analyst. And failed out of embarrassment. Because you created a solution that does not fulfill the project’s Objective, Goal, and Purpose. So, it is crucial to identifying the organization’s, project’s, or stakeholder’s business goals, needs, and requirements.

You might create a fantastic product yet still fail this project since it does not satisfy the project’s objectives. This is a terrible incident for a business analyst.

03 Questions to Ask Yourself

  1. What is the purpose of the project

    • Why approve this project?
    • Why we are budgeting for this project?

  2. What are the goals and objectives of this project?

    • What is the return on investment?
    • What are the main critical pieces and components?

  3. In the eyes of this project, what is a success?

    • How will it be measured?
    • Have you preferred the Measurement matrix?

After you have those specifics, you can begin working through and eliciting requirements. Yes, there will be additional features and enhancements that customers may desire as part of the project, but your primary focus should be to address the problem that the project is designed to solve.

Creating a product that does not solve the problem wastes a lot of time and money, and it is also incredibly embarrassing. And Business Case can help you with the mentioned issues.

What is a Business Case?

A business case is a formal document that’s created by someone who isn’t ultimately making the decision, so they’re creating that document to sell the decision-maker on moving forward, one, taking some action, and then two, taking action in the recommended way.

Ultimately, it is a document that is delivered to decision-makers and tells them, OK, based on these specific activities, here’s the cost-benefit ratio, here’s the return on investment by making a choice one way or another

What is the purpose of creating a business case?

A business case is used to identify and emphasize potential problems or opportunities for a company. Then there are the many possibilities available to them, as well as the recommended solution by the person building the business case.

Ultimately, it is the driver of initiatives. Many businesses will begin initiatives entirely on the basis of written business arguments. So they have their staff produce business cases, which are then presented to a decision-making committee, a person, or a group, who say, ‘OK, here are all the business cases now, on which ones make sense.’

A business case is created to outline potential solutions, costs, and advantages for a given problem or opportunity. It’s virtually a sales approach to sell the business and invest money in fixing that specific problem or pursuing that specific opportunity. The important element is the advice - that person is driving and saying, “This is what we should do.”

When is Business Case Used?

There are two points to discuss here.

  • First and foremost, practically all initiatives have a business case. The only difference is whether or not it is written. A business case is a type of decision-making process that you go through if you want to move on with anything.

  • The second point is that the business case is completed prior to beginning a project. So there’s no purpose in preparing a business case after you’ve started working on the project since the company has already invested in it, but it’s normally done early on to secure money, budget, move forward, and actually kick off and square up a project to actually move forward and solution for it. So that’s when it’s finished, and a business case is employed.

A business case is often prepared to discover the following answers:

  • What are we trying to solve?
  • What are the different solutions that we could potentially use to solve that problem?
  • What’s the return on investment?
  • What’s the cost?
  • What’s the benefit to be able to do that?
  • What are the risks associated with the endeavor?
  • And then, What’s the recommended solution?

It is a decision-making tool is used to assess the impact of a certain decision on profitability.

Who creates a business case?

It can be a lot of different people. The most common people who create are business executives. This could be VPs, directors, business managers, so this is a person that leads a team.

It could be a business analyst also because of the role he plays. So we can assume that we as a Business Analyst creating the business case or at least we’re helping create the business case so that we understand writing.

05 Phases of Developing an Effective Business Case

So there are really five phases to an effective business case and anyone can create a business case following these steps. These are as follows:

  1. Initial Analysis
  2. Determining Potential Solution
  3. Write the Business Case
  4. Review Business Case
  5. Present the Business Case

Initial Analysis: Phase 01

The first thing is an initial analysis. You need to understand what the root of the problem or opportunity is before you can start working on a solution. You need to fully understand it, you need to define who it’s all affecting and how it’s affecting, right, and detailing all the pieces to that problem.

The second thing is under the initial analysis you need to determine some high-level requirements, you want to get an idea of what the business requirements are and this isn’t a full, you know, business requirements documents or anything like that. Most of the time with just a few additional questions you’ll be able to sort of understand that problem.

The third thing is, you want to understand what data you’re going to need to sell this idea and sell the return on investment. The business case needs to be able to do is to convince decision-makers to take action. You just want to convince them to go towards your recommended solution.

So you want to identify and get information or understand where you can get information to help determine that. Suppose, your support team solving their cases within 72 hours. But as part of the business, you have kind of a motto that you go by that you’ll have their customers’ case solved within 48 hours. So now you’re going in to identify what is causing that. What is the problem?

Identifying Potential Solutions: Phase 02

The second thing is determining the potential solutions to the problem. So not just looking at ‘OK, well here’s what I want, here’s the way I want to go’, you got to look for all the possible options that could utilize?’

The first thing you need to do before creating a business case is make sure the level of return is worth the potential investments. Some people skip this step and then they’ll go to present it and their boss will say ‘oh, we already know about that problem’. That’s not good. Then you just wasted all this time creating a business case.

You want to determine all of the potential solutions, you don’t want to leave out any solutions. One potential solution should be that you do nothing. It could be that one action is to take no action, you want to have that is a potential solution for the project.

You want to identify all the possible solutions to the problem and you don’t want to just, you know, have high level them, you want to understand what the benefits are of each one.

It would have taken us 50 years to break even before we even made back our investment on that. And we all know our system is not going to last 50 years so we probably moved that system in a number of years and never would have made our return on that particular issue.

You want to make sure that the benefits, cost, timetable, time for return on investment, and risks are all clearly defined. And then you want to identify the risks of that particular project. So maybe your system is not very well defined and you could break a whole bunch of other stuff rates, so the costs are really low but the risks are really high.

Write the Business Case: Phase 03

In phase two, you’ve done a lot of work on the business case. Most companies have a template that you use for their company as some are a little bit more formal, some are less formal.

A business case has the following six sections:

  • Executive Summary
  • Problem Statement
  • Analysis
  • Solution Options
  • Cost Benefit Analysis
  • Recommendation

The executive summary is the thing at the top of the document, but that’s usually the last thing that’s done. The whole point of that is executives are not going to have time to read the whole document. They need a bird’ eye view to understand the high levels of it.

The next thing is the problem statement. So this is the well-defined problem statement as to the opportunity or issue that we’re having that we’re solving for and this should be very succinct and very clear. No ambiguity.

Next is the analysis that you did, you have some documentation there as to what you did what you were looking at how it went, and what you found. Then you go into your solution options and so this should be listing out those potential options.

Next is Solution options, breaks down the top solutions that were explored. Provided as a list with a brief description of the potential solutions and the pros and cons of each. One option should always be to do nothing.

Then we have the cost-benefit analysis afterward. Some people want to use some type of matrix or matrices that have a solution, cost, benefits, return on investment. There are some different forms that people use and different companies use. So they all have that, but it’s just a matter of it’s as if it’s own section or if it’s rolled up into the solution options section.

And then last but not least is the recommendation. This is what are you recommending and here’s everything the problem, potential solutions. I’ve done other research and here’s what I recommend we move forward with. So that’s how you write the business case.

Review Business Case: Phase 04

The fourth thing is reviewing the business case, making sure it’s good, you don’t have any mistakes, and kind of in doing all that.

This is just like a resume. You want to make sure that this is good and solid otherwise, your hard work on this may go to waste. So you want to go back through your business case and validate that that that problem statement justifies a call to action.

The second thing you want to make sure is that all the possible solutions are given to potential customers. You don’t want to leave a solution out or a potential solution out because it may be competes with your recommended solution.

The third thing is double to check your cost-benefit analysis calculations. It’s really easy to get those mixed up and that can really throw everything off and if somebody points out a mistake in your presentation your credibility is shot. So you want to make sure that that’s accurate.

Third is you want to objectively dissect your recommendation. Don’t just go with that option because that sounds like the coolest option and just a project you really love to run. And make sure you’re objectively dissecting your recommendation, so it’s right for the business.

Obviously, correct any grammatical or spelling mistakes and then you also need to get the buy-in of two key stakeholders before presenting it to decision-makers.

Present the Business Case: Phase 05

And then the fifth thing, the final step there is presenting that business case. The whole goal of the business case and presenting the business case is to get the business to say ‘yes, we agree and we want to move forward with that recommendation or that project’.

The first thing you want to remind yourself that they have no idea what the problem is, they have no know what the possible solutions are. And if they’re lost, there’s no way that you’re going to get their agreement for funding You might have sent the business case to them prior to the meeting as part of the invite.

If decision-makers don’t see that there’s a problem they’re not going to really listen to your solutions and recommendations because they’re going to say it’s not that big of a problem. So you want to make sure that you’re kind of selling them that there’s a problem.

Next thing is give your recommendation. You don’t need to go through everything you want to, you know, talk about that, talk about the problem and then give your recommendation and then you can talk about the return on investment for that particular recommendation.

You then, I like to then circle back and look at why I went with my recommended solution over that particular solution. It helps people to kind of rule out the other options that might have been looked at.

The next thing is you want to touch on each risk. You don’t want a deep dive and spend too much time on the risks that are there. You just want to make sure that they’re aware that there’s a risk. And if they have questions, It is guaranteed, they will stop and ask you to go deeper into that risk.

You want to make sure that you’re ending with those benefits and that return on investment. So you want to end with saying, you know, this is going to help solve that problem. And here are the benefits, here’s when we get our return, and then everything after that is profit.

So those are the five phases that a business analyst shall utilize in creating an effective business case.

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Hi, This is Rafayet Hossain

A seasoned Business System Analyst (BSA), Project Manager, and SQA Engineer. He acts as a change agent to enable digital changes to your organization.

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