A simple recipe for business case building.
For technical people writing a business case can be very intimidating. In reality, with the correct approach it is quite straightforward. Think of it like a recipe – it needs the right ingredients, prepared the right way.
Make these 5 ingredients your simple recipe for a winning business plan.
1. Get an executive sponsor. Business cases win through a combination of strong analysis and strong influencing. An executive sponsor will help you on both fronts. Do diligence on selecting your sponsor, it needs to be someone passionate about your idea and influential in the community that will make the funding decision.
2. Identify your burning platform. Action needs motivation. That motivation needs to be simple to communicate and compelling. Read the burning platform blog for best practices.
3. Align your business plan with company strategy. If you want better tools for R&D and your company strategy is to increase innovation, then show how your proposal will help the company achieve that.
4. Get finance or marketing to help with ROI. Expressing the value of your project and the cost of inaction is a must and support from finance or marketing is a gamechanger, whether its official or unofficial guidance. You will see multiple benefits:
a. They will help you use company methodology. This avoids derailing debates over the validity of the methodology and finance/ marketing can give you templates and standard assumptions for things like employee costs, market sizing, depreciation, risk etc.
b. They will often know the best budgets and company strategies to focus on.
c. They will help you identify and articulate the value within your business case.
5. Identify and mitigate risks. All business plans have risks and weaknesses. Your job is to show you have identified the pitfalls and have a plan to manage them. I find that getting feedback is the best way to do this, humans love identifying problems! List the biggest risks and their mitigations in your business case: e.g. If one risk is high investment, set success-based funding milestones that mitigate that.
