Business Case Development

Overview

The days of IT projects without business ‘buy-in’ are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Many organisations already need to create business cases for all but the smallest of IT projects, and at those organisations where business cases are not a necessity having a polished business case to hand can increase your chances of gaining funds for your project – and increasing the likelihood of project success.

Business cases for IT projects have clear benefits, business cases:

• present the business problem and potential gains in a language the rest of the organization can understand;
• ensure that the technical solution is directly addressing the key business problems and opportunities at hand;
• provide valuable metrics to judge the project and solution success;
• enable buy-in from non-IT directors and executives.

Advanced 365 has extensive experience serving as advisors to technical and non-technical executives alike, and helping them discern how their technology can be best utilised – and develop the business case for a variety of new initiatives, including: new technology, process redesign, creation of a project management office, an IT service management initiative, or an enterprise architecture design.

The Process

The key focus of each Advanced 365 Business Case Engagement is to determine what technologies and processes can bring value to the business and how, and evaluate those against business, organizational and technical fit. This engagement can be focused on a particular technology or technology family, or remain technology agnostic.

A typical timeline is five to ten days. This will depend on the scope of the area to be reviewed, as well as the level of detail required. A ten day engagement would include five days of interviews and document collection, followed by a further five days of analysis and business case preparation. Throughout the engagement our consultants would expect to be in close communication with the project sponsor and others in your business as appropriate to feed back initial discoveries, insights and preliminary recommendations.

The Final Deliverable

The final deliverable is a business case for a particular technology implementation, or more broadly a technology-driven change initiative. The business case would usually include the following sections: fit with current organisational enterprise architecture, business and strategic imperatives, benefits and metrics for measurement (benefits would include financial benefits as well as analysis of other balanced-scorecard benefits to the organization), anticipated financial models and financial returns, business processes impacted or changed, replacement dates and high-level costs for the solution.