business case

Business cases are works of fiction. Try storytelling instead.

Business cases are works of fiction. Try storytelling instead.

  • Monday, 27 January, 2014
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Instead of PowerPoint, use storytelling to paint a picture of what you want to achieve.

A business case is little more than an educated guess. It’s a description of a current state, what you plan to do and what results you expect. It’s a prediction of what might be and will almost certainly be wrong. Framing it in this predictive language makes it unbelievable, and doesn’t allow discourse around what is likely to go wrong. Sure, you’ll have some RAIDS, risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies, but these are generally lists to be glossed over. The focus of the business case is how are we going to make money.

A business case is a business document that exists to persuade stakeholders to back your idea. It’s a rationale plea to ‘back me” based on backward looking facts for forward thinking fiction.

Two points.

One. Stop the pleading, quit asking for permission. You believe in what you are presenting so assume it is a done deal. Describe it as such. Assume that your case is so great that approval is a given. Tell that story.

Two. Let’s be honest. It’s little more than a work of fiction. So use that admission to your advantage.

It we treat the future-state as a fiction, yet to be written, what’s missing in the business case is a narrative. Narrative is storytelling. Tell your business case, your idea, your pitch as a story. Write it in the past tense as though the product has been delivered. Tell the history, of what happened, who was involved. The pitfalls that were encountered. The problems that were faced. Describe the project in retrospect. Imagine your future self, basking in the glory of the successful delivery of the product (with some bumps along the way – it won’t really come in on time, on budget will it?!) Your future self looks back and recounts in prose the story. Beginning, middle. End.

Go all the way back to the start; what problems did the team want to address? What was the opportunity that was seen at the time. And why was the project commissioned? It was the story that did it. The team bought into the story; the inspiring narrative that painted a picture of what the journey might be like, warts and all.

So ditch the Word document business case template, throw out the PowerPoint slides with their bullets and charts. Imagine the future and craft a story that paints the picture of what you and your team achieved. There’s your business case. That’s why we are passionate and driven to do this. Stories are hard to kill.

About a successful project that was a failiure

  • Wednesday, 18 November, 2009
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On time, on budget, to the scope that was agreed from the outset of development.  A successful project?  Well no actually.  It was a complete failure.

Here is a story about an insurance company with a number of differnet products sold through intermediaries.  Whilst the intermediaries were good at selling single insurance products, they weren’t so good at cross-selling or up-selling other products.  Focus groups with the intermediaries revealed that they didn’t know about all the other types of insurance available through the company.

What if the intermediaries could have a portal where they could access all our insurance products in the same place with customer alerts and sales support prompts identifying further selling opportunities?

From this initial idea a benefits case was pulled together consisting of a product definition and financial projections.  In pulling together the benefits case, the potential revenue uplift numbers surprised everyone.  Signing off the benefits case on the new Intermediary Portal was duly signed off, and the product definition was handed over to IT to build.

Being an agile IT shop, the business and developers sat down together and got their heads around the product definition.  It soon became clear that the challenge was one of “single sign-on”.  Each of the insurance products offered were on a different legacy application that required the intermediaries to sign-on with different credentials.  To bring them all together in a single portal was far harder than the simple problem that the initial product definition suggested.

In pulling together the benefits case, a rough estimate had been supplied by IT. Now it was an in-flight project with an initial list of stories, it became clear that they had significantly under-estimated.   Of the twenty different products that the business wanted on the portal, for the budget the business had set aside would deliver barely four products.

With new estimates a release plan was drawn up.  Release one would deliver single sign-on across four products identified by the business as being most profitable.  All the  sales support tools were de-scoped and scheduled for a third release with the second release delivering single sign-on for the remaining products.

Development started, the business stakeholders worked closely with the developers and the First Release of the Intermediary Portal went live with congratulations all round.  Funding for the next release was lined up depending upon the success of the first release.  But that success never came, take-up was less than expected and the cross and up-selling never materialised.

The proposition to the intermediaries as delivered was flawed; the portal had to be all or nothing, single sign-on across four unrelated products was not compelling to them.  There was no sales support.  The intermediaries thought “so what?”  IT had delivered on the business requirements yet the project was deemed a failure.

This story tells a striking lesson. The project failure was due to a lack of joined-up thinking.  The business and IT both had followed their processes and done the right thing.  The business had identified an opportunity, built a benefits case and had this signed off.  IT had run a model agile project with close engagement with the business.  However whilst both stages of the process were locally optimised, they were done in isolation of each other.  Once the (development) train had left the station both sides were committed to delivering the product portal.  No-one returned to the business case, no-one went back to the end users, the intermediaries and asked whether the cut down scope for the first release would actually be of value to them.  More importantly, IT were engaged too late in the process.  The business had settled on an IT solution to the problem without engaging IT.  Had IT been party to the ideation and visioning process they would have been able to raise the risk of the project complexity earlier on.  Indeed they could have killed the project before it started.

Returning to the initial problem; “intermediaries weren’t so good at cross-selling or up-selling other products… Focus groups with the intermediaries revealed that they didn’t know about all the other types of insurance available through the company.”  The problem didn’t need a portal solution. The issue was one of awareness; almost certainly an off-line marketing campaign would have delivered a greater ROI without the need for IT to build the wrong product.

It’s bad said the doc, case of business locked in, customer locked out.

  • Wednesday, 15 July, 2009
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The customer is the oxygen that keeps a business alive.  No. The customer is more than just the oxygen that keeps the business alive, (my mother was recently on a life support machine with Guillian Barre Syndrome; she was getting oxygen but paralysed, unable to move.  With that condition you see that life is more than just about breathing oxygen).  The customer is more than just corporate oxygen, it is the reason a business lives for.

Shareholder value means nothing if the organisation doesn’t provide value to the customer.  Yet  I see far too many organisations who fail to grasp  the importance of their customers.  They prioritise their internal processes and policies to the detriment of customer satisfaction.  They focus upon narrow propositions that represent organisational silos rather than meeting the broad needs of the customer.  Innovation is morphed into ‘requirements’ that are performed by ‘actors’ in multiple volumes of ‘use cases’.  To my mind, too many organisations are struck down by corporate Guillian Barre Syndrome.  The brain knows what is going on but is powerless to act.  It feels pain, it senses something is wrong but is paralysed, it cannot move.  Prisoner in its own body.

If that is the diagnosis, what is the cure?  There are many, but a starting point would be to place the customer at the heart of your design.  Don’t start any proposition without the customer experience at the core.  Create personas and walk through customer journeys.  Use scenarios to develop your thinking.  Broaden the scenarios to introduce what-if models.  If it is an internet offering, sketch out the screens, if it is a service, sketch out the touch-points with your people, processes and technology.  Don’t allow the proposition to be talked of in the abstract, work with the concrete.  Would a persona accept the experience your proposing? Would she accept that pricing model? Does that journey make sense? You do not need to spend weeks and months documenting the exercise.  A couple of days with the right people in the right room with white boards, post-it notes and business-speak banished from the proceedings should deliver far more fruitful insights than playing document-tennis with revision after revision after revision. You may even kill the proposition before you invest too much time on it. Or better still identify a better, customer-centric proposition waiting in the wings.

How long does it take to start. I mean really start?

  • Thursday, 19 March, 2009
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Let’s assume that you are not bought into the whole agile thing.  That doesn’t mean you can’t look at your IT organisation and identify waste and fat in the process.  How long does it take from the business having an idea and requesting IT to build something to the developers actually starting to code?

This seems to be common: The initial ‘idea’ is fed into the PMO team, it is documented with a high level scope, rough business case and napkin estimate of +/- 100%.  Elapsed time (i.e. the time from the first email or conversation requesting the requirement through to the initial scope document being circulated and approved): two weeks, value added time (i.e. the time actually spent thinking, doing or deciding); two hours.  The project, having gained approval in principle, is then prioritised.  Some organisations actively monitor thier project protfolio, others do it annually, with the business having to put in project requests when the budgets are set.  Mid-cycle and the project is unlikely to take off.

Let’s assume PMO agree the value of the project, next step is high level design.  Analysts capture high level requirements, ascertain what the business really wants and refine the business case further.  IT puts some high level estimates against the requirements, with a +/- 80% confidence.  Elapsed time: eight weeks.  Value added time two weeks.  With a refined business case to take to PMO or the steering commitee all that has changed now is that we have some more detail and a guess on what it might cost.  We are ten weeks down the road and we still have not made a decision whether the project will commence.  This due dilligence is notionally about reducing risk and keeping costs in check, but in reality, what value has been added?

Now it is time for detailed design.  Another (elapsed time) eight weeks of analysis, drilling down into the requirements.  Documentation follows workshops, only now the specification is no longer speaking the language of the business.  Use cases, UML, it’s all getting slightly technical and the business are not really sure what they are reviewing.  Let’s call it another couple of weeks of actual value that is added.

Eighteen weeks elapsed time, countless meetings, momentum and still no decision on whether project will start, let alone a line of code being written.  But the business case is really taking shape and IT have got the estimates down to a 20% confidence limit.

The project gets the go-ahead, but it is not yet time to start coding.  Technical design needs to take place, four weeks of architects architecting and documenting the spec.  Six months has elapsed (of which maybe a month was actually doing stuff that positively contributed to the success of the delivery) and finally the developers start writing code.

What value did that six months deliver?  Requirements, design, business and estimates.  Yet we all know that the requirements will change, and with that the business case.  The estimates will be way out, but we’ll justify the process of estimation because they would have been right it the requirements hadn’t change during the build…

Knocking the process is easy.  What’s the alternative? Start with a burning desire to release something of value at the earliest responsible moment.  Get the business in the same room as the analysts and the architects and get them to articulate their vision.  Use personas and more importantly scenarios and customer journeys to drive out the business vision.  Ask the analyst to capture the business intents on index cards.  Lots of whiteboarding, visualisation and pictures to inform the thinking.  Don’t dwell on the detail, this is about capturing the intent of the system, what are the desired outcomes that it will deliver, how will it impact the lives of all the people who will touch it.  Next step is to prioritise these outcomes.  Collate these into the minimum set that would make a coherent and compelling product that you could go to market with.  For the business case make basic assumptions on the revenue that this feature set will deliver (or what costs it will save) and ask the architects and developers in the room to do some high level estimates.  The whole process should take no more than a week (you could get a first cut done in a couple of days) and there is your initial business case.  If we accept that estimates are little better than guesses and things will change anyway, if we have an initial realisable goal that we have demonstrated will deliver value, why not go straight into development.  By actually ‘doing’ you will minimise risks that you can only predict on paper, and value will be delivered so much quicker, indeed you should be able to have something to market, generating revenue in the same timescales that you otherwise spent planning and analysing.  And if you still want to do waterfall, you’ve got a smaller number of requirements to analyse and design for, again, delivering value sooner.