Week 4 - Summary - Preparation of a Business Case

This week we studied about preparing a Business Case inline with ITIL and Prince2 project management techniques. We learnt about various factors to justify and convince our stakeholders that the change will bring value not only to the business or organisation but to them as well. We also looked at what will make a business case more effective and successful when it is presented to the stakeholders for them to buy-in to it.

We looked at the issues relating to a change in a business/organisation and possible solutions to address them. We discussed the Causes, Effects and the Consequences of a Change in relation to the business and its stakeholders.

Mark also briefed us on how to make a good Proposal or a Business Case and suggested to make it short and simple with more information available to all if they need it, outlining the What (Cause), Why (effect) and the Benefits to be gained (consequences). The Proposal may also covers areas such as risks, costs, contingency, time-scales etc.

We also learnt about how we can get stakeholders to buy-in to the proposal. For this, we did a small exercise to see what benefit a Change will bring and what are the issues around it. We looked at the People or stakeholder's issues and discussed what will it take to convince them and justify this Change. Different group of students came with lots of issues and solution to address this, some of them are listed below:

· Personal Incentives (What’s in it for me)
· Culture/Attitude
· Fear (Afraid of Technology)
· Lack of interest
· Historic Failures of similar change
· Disbelieve
· Too Difficult
· Don’t see any benefit
· Too much radical changes

Then we did an exercise to combat such concerns by highlighting the benefits for business as well as the stakeholders. This is done by:

· Producing case studies of similar change to show the successes.
· Highlight the incentive to the stakeholders and address the ‘what’s in it for me’ by giving examples such as working smart, effectively, more opportunities, higher rewards etc.
· Opportunities to learn more
· Explain that if the business gets efficient and profitable as a result, it will mean sustainability, growth prospects for all its stakeholders

We compared the Cost and Benefits, discussed the potential Risks of not going ahead with this change. Use of tools such as Gap Analysis and PMF to identify Risk associated in regards to the capabilities and core competencies.

Quick Wins:

We also looked at the appropriate communication that is required for quick wins. They include:

· That the communicaiton is understandable
· Explaining what happens before, during and after the change
· Various means of communication is to be used
· Invite stakeholder for feedback and suggestions
· Should be able to quantify improvement

We also needed to measure the improvement that have come due to this implementation, thing to consider here is the reliability, availability, productivity, contingency in place and increase customer satisfaction i.e. from the Goals to Questions to Metrics.
I hope this is useful, I welcome comments on this please.

Thanks,
Javed