CUPE's Insight to HM Treasury's Better Business Cases
Get Great Ideas Done! Find the Best Win/Win Outcome, Enhancing Support and Overcoming your Critics.
Have you ever discussed a great business idea with your team? Were you excited to get things moving? But did the meeting end with the inevitable phrase, ‘Well – we’re going to need a pretty convincing business case’?
If so, did you feel a sense of anxiety and uncertainty; possibly asking ‘How do I make it convincing?’ Or ‘How can I avoid a never-ending game of business tennis?’ (You know – you make a ballsy proposal only to have it continually returned!).
Whether the idea is for greater business agility, digital transformation, realising a new service or supporting curiosity within a work-team, you’ll need to make a convincing case! A smart way to go could be to adapt the Better Business Cases model to suit your organisation.
Five tips:
So let’s pick up on five quick learning points from the HM Treasury Better Business Cases approach:
1. Strategic - Be Compelling - Make a Case of Need – explain what’s needed to achieve the goal, what is available at present and the gap to be scaled. This step defines proposal boundaries.
2. Economic - Be Relevant – Significant Improvement – showing who benefits and how they would assess the service options. Be innovative and imaginative; get the right people involved, identify what matters most, and quantify their interest in the alternatives.
3. Commercial - Be Pragmatic – confirm who can deliver the service or solution; what it would cost and risks to delivery – the project management classics: on-time, on-cost, on-quality; full scope and benefits. Confirm robust procurement and contractual procedures.
4. Financial - Be Prudent – clarify what is affordable to the organisation, in financial terms, over the whole lifetime of the new service or solution. Use a comparative approach for return on investment.
5. Management - Be Convincing – plan the implementation of the scheme; illustrate how stakeholders will be kept informed. Use graphics and video models where possible.
For most people, just 20 hours of study into Business Cases will make a huge difference to the outcome!
Each of these points should be presented crisply, after exploring what’s needed, possible and available to decision-makers; it is critical to show how the preferred way forward, to scale a service gap, is reflected in the chosen service improvement or solution.
The risks of choosing the wrong option are greatly reduced by adopting an evolutionary approach – from high level to detail, to option appraisal and project implementation – and communicating the future benefits with a focus on costs and milestone delivery when developing reporting arrangements for user representatives.
So that’s all there is to it! Just find a good guide (and possibly a good facilitator or trainer) and you are sure to hit a home run! Having used and taught Better Business Cases, over many years, I can say it provides a great framework for working through competing ideas. It’s also scalable, from relatively simple to complex cases. It’s certainly a great help to individual or network organisations, especially when meeting disparate user and customer needs.
Good Practice:
Better Business Cases has recently been recognised as good practice by the World Bank, to present a clear way forward. So, tailor it to your situation, and give it go! You can raise your confidence with the APMG Foundation and Practitioner level examinations; that way, the whole organisation benefits by bringing great business ideas to life!
