Whatever stage of growth your business is in, it’s important to acknowledge that every action you take has some kind of opportunity cost. Completing a business case encourages everyone to pause, deeply explore all avenues, remove emotion and objectively choose an option that has the best chance of success.
In a scaling team or large business, it can be easy for decision-making to become more decentralised, making it challenging for everyone to be across every decision that is happening in the business. Publishing a business case helps share this collective knowledge, and provides an archive to retrospectively examine why certain decisions were right or wrong.
Lots of people are good at talking through ideas on the fly, but it’s a less common skill to be able to make a compelling argument through writing. Practising the art of writing business cases can help improve the skill of communicating thoughts, and articulating logic and data that sit behind arguments.
Whatever stage of growth your business is in, it’s important to acknowledge that every action you take has some kind of opportunity cost. Completing a business case encourages everyone to pause, deeply explore all avenues, remove emotion and objectively choose an option that has the best chance of success.
Whatever stage of growth your business is in, it’s important to acknowledge that every action you take has some kind of opportunity cost. Completing a business case encourages everyone to pause, deeply explore all avenues, remove emotion and objectively choose an option that has the best chance of success.
Lots of people are good at talking through ideas on the fly, but it’s a less common skill to be able to make a compelling argument through writing. Practising the art of writing business cases can help improve the skill of communicating thoughts, and articulating logic and data that sit behind arguments.
A business case is a type of framework that can be useful when trying to encourage objective reasoning around where to invest resources into an activity. It outlines the rationale for the investment, including an analysis of the benefits and costs of the investment and what the expected return on investment is. The business case should provide enough information to enable an organisation to make an informed decision on whether or not to proceed with the project.
Our downloadable business case template is a Word document framework broken down into 6 different sections: Recommendation, Problem, Main supporting argument, Other options considered, cost and expected ROI and Next steps. For each section, we have easy-to-understand definitions that are easy for everyone in the business to follow.
