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Are you in the process of building business cases or other business proposals? Or are you charged with assessing them?

Are you, like many others, having difficulty in expressing your proposals in terms of well-founded and measurable numbers that you can confidently explain and justify?

And if your role involves assessing proposals, is it unclear how to evaluate their validity, robustness or completeness?

Many people find that there seem to be few, real sources of help available for what you might find to be the most difficult parts of those processes.

The Big Question

The big question is often: how do you translate the projects you have in mind, into the business outcomes you want?

The diagram represents the notional major sections of a business case or business proposal.

Our experience is that the shaded area in the diagram is the most challenging. That's the area where you set out to explain why a: new CRM system, ERP system, order management system... fill in the blanks, will produce great things. Or it may be why adopting a formal project management methodology, or adopting CMMI, or Agile business methods, or Six Sigma or ISO 9000, will increase efficiency, effectiveness or reduce costs. 

It's in that critical area where explicitly or otherwise, a new or changed business model is being proposed. The proposed business model (or 'profitability model' or 'operational model') lurking there is the 'engine' underpinning your proposal.

It, and its viability, is what determines the validity or feasibility of the overall proposal. Hence, that model is what needs to be most critically examined by those assessing proposals. 

If you can get that model worked out clearly, and it provides the numbers to feed into the financial appraisal.
The financial appraisal is then (relatively) straightforward.

In the articles, case studies and other information sources provided on these pages, you will find outlines of techniques to  help you develop or assess business cases and proposals. We also have a few words to add on the traditional process for building and justifying project proposals. We will make the outrageous claims that the traditional process actually: -

• increases the difficulties in building good business cases/proposals
   

• causes the difficulties many organisations experience in aligning project proposals with business objectives and strategy
   

• and increases the risk of failure in project investments

We will even recommend an approach that resolves those pitfalls, but that's for later !