Business cases ‘mature’ through different levels and deliver commensurate value at each level. To move progressively through the five levels takes time and destroys too much value during any evolution.

The business case was found to be the greatest destroyer of business value as it left too much value ‘on the table’ unidentified. The combination of poor business case document and process design directly leads to value being missed, lost or destroyed.

This does not need to be - but it does require an understanding of what the business case needs to be.

This book clarifies that the business case is 

• a business document owned by the governance team
• a strategy document with financials 
• central to the focus of the project - the project exists to deliver the business case
• must not only be measurable but trackable throughout the project and beyond, 
• and the financials must be able to be recomputed on realization

Most business case would fail on most of these criteria - too often the business case is seen as a project and financial document, and so on.

If you’re going to extract maximum value from your projects you need to firstly identify the maximum benefits and determine how you’re going to deliver them. This Book equips you with the knowledge of how to establish a process to enable this and gives you a value-based business case template to use as a base.

The chapters are

1. The business case role
2. Business case maturity
3. The business case process
4. Business case critical elements
5. The business case value proposition
6. The desired business outcomes
7. The business benefits
8. The financial benefits
9. Business case generation
10. Business case evaluation
11. Business case completion

• PPMOs - to equip them to design and manage their organization’s business case process
• Project practitioners - to inform them of the true role of the business case and its essential elements
• Governance teams - to enable them to understand the required nature of the business case that they need to ‘own’
• Project Investment Committee/Board - to understand what their business case process needs to conform to
• Auditors - to understand the true role of the business case so they can audit it effectively

• Explains the common misconceptions relating to business cases
• Spells out the role of the business case
• Defines the six evaluation questions that every business case needs to be able to answer (and why)
• Discusses the essential value components of the business case which are too often missing
• Equips the reader to redesign their organization’s business case to be value-focused and enabling

Business case training by chapter