You have a wealth of ideas but limited resources. You need a way to determine what ideas are worth pursuing as smart investment decisions.
A business case framework, designed and then embedded in your organisation, will:
- ensure that benefits are identified and then balanced against costs
- prevent misalignment between organisational actions and strategy
- align organisational actions with strategy
- give management greater monitoring and control over funding
- recognise the capacity of your organisation's resources
- prepare the way for projects to implement
- support and improve decision making
- reduce unnecessary spending
- ensure that benefits are identified and then balanced against costs
- align organisational actions with strategy
- give greater monitoring and control over funding
- recognise the capacity of your organisation's resources
- prepare the way for projects to implement
Codetta designs the framework to make these things happen, and embeds them with full training for your organisation leading to more effective and efficient spending decisions and implementation plans.
When correctly designed, put in place and applied, the more efficient planning and approval process has showed saving between 30% and 40% in time taken and cost of production of business cases
Once embedded, compared with unstructured approaches,
organisations save between
in time taken and cost of production of business cases
Once embedded, compared with unstructured approaches,
organisations save between
in time taken and cost of production of business cases
Understanding that projects are never the full story.
Properly developed cases, especially if integrated with your project management framework, provide your project teams with quality information that they can be build upon and progressively elaborate to a point where it can be executed.
A key role of of a business case framework is to ensure that benefits of a project are never lost during the life of the project. Reference back to the case, at mandatory points of the project management lifecycle ensures that the project remains viable.
Often the project will successfully deliver its goals, but that is not the same as the organisations goals. Your framework will need to ensure benefit ownership after the project is closed to ensure that the full intent of the original case is delivered.
An important advantage that a business case approach to expenditure approval, is that you may determine that management approaches, other than project management are in your best interest...
Your business case management framework (CASE) will:
- contain and interconnect
- all the elements that support and guide
- the wide range of activities you need
- to determine what ideas are worth pursuing as smart investment decisions.
Our solution is your business case management framework:
- designed around the way your organisation works
- with every element agreed by management
- clearly and visually documented
- and everyone impacted trained to understand and use it
Designed to be fast, thorough and interconnected.
We design the process and train your people to quickly identify the activities that must have a case developed and those that do not need one. We put in place the process to ensure that cases are aligned to prioritised against the organisations strategy.
Good decision making is facilitated by designing, establishing and maintaining appropriate structures. These must also be related to the governance structures that manage your operations, projects and programmes management to ensure that benefits are realised.
Roles and responsibilities, defined and aligned with your organisations culture, ensures from the outset that everyone knows what is expected of them and that they are ready to carry out the work needed. Roles are based on best practice and we work to secure agreement along the way.
Your business case lifecycle allows everyone to understand what to do at each stage. It gives senior management control over the cases that are approved, the ones that move forward and creates the opportunity to direct what needs to be improved.
Frameworks are successful because they integrate the processes and contain the steps that bring together all the necessary information to allow decisions be made by the right people. They make sure all necessary resource needs, risk and compliance steps are taken.
Our process documents are designed to be agile. They are aligned to your organisations processes and language. They are tailored, structured, simple and thorough with every aspect explained, so that even if they are being used for the first time, they can easily be completed.
Having a toolbox of mandatory and optional tools, combined with the guidelines that make sure the correct techniques are applied, makes the wide range of activities needed to produce a business case, easier, faster, more accurate and comprehensive.
Control points, designed with integrated communication reporting and review, ensure that the organisation's management and wider stakeholders can monitor business case progress and modify and control their limited resources, increasing the probability of success.
To put the framework in place, we deliver a full training campaign for all those who will use it and those who will be directly impacted. We also include an awareness campaign for everyone else in the organisation, because in reality, everyone in the organisation is impacted.
Approved business cases will need to be executed. A business case framework that is integrated with your approach to projects, allows your project management teams to build on the good work already completed while generating the business case, speeding up the time to delivery.
"That's the thing about making a movie: You never finish editing. They just take it away from you"
Lights
Business cases are a way of shining light on ideas to see if they really have potential. The process examines a number of options, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages. Cases also bring costs and benefits into the open for the first time, so they can be compared against each other.
Camera
A core function of a business case is to capture and freeze its contents at the time of approval. This gives senior management the confidence to pass the case over to the team tasked with delivering its benefits, knowing that no matter how much time passes, the original intentions are there to be referenced.
Action
Once approved, business cases require action to turn your intentions into reality. Organisations must factor in the most appropriate management approach to achieve this, typically project or programme management. This is why business cases must be built with implementation in mind.
"...that's a wrap (wind reel and print!)"
