HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case (HBR Guide Series)

Whether or not there’s a standard format, find out what other presenters in your company have done. This will give you ideas for your own presentation—and a sense of what stakeholders might expect from you. Reach out to several coworkers who have recently gotten approval for business cases and ask to see their documents. Look for similarities. Did your colleagues use PowerPoint or Word? How did they describe the business need? What kind of data did they include in backup slides? How did they render the data? Also get your hands on a few rejected cases, if you can, to see what their project leads did differently. Did they fail to address risk? Were their documents too long or not substantial enough?

Look at Past Presentations

Consider Alternatives
Now that you’ve selected your team, it’s time to start brainstorming. Bring your experts and beneficiaries together to think about potential solutions. Briefly describe the pain, who’s feeling it, and its underlying cause—just to orient the group—and ask for suggestions on how to alleviate it. Lay out the ideas that stakeholders or beneficiaries proposed early on, and ask your team to generate several more. Encourage people to look beyond their own unit or function: How have other departments met this need? What have other companies done? What’s worked, and what hasn’t?
At the beginning of a meeting like this, don’t put constraints on people. Let them think out loud. Then, after the team generates options, you can mention limitations to focus their thinking and spur additional ideas

And it’s much easier to get approval if your stakeholders know that people from their departments helped create the proposal.

By involving these people in building the business case, you don’t just gain access to information (though that’s important); you also gain their support.

Someone who regularly talks with customers

Build a Cross-Functional Team

Don’t attempt to do the forecasting and ROI calculations on your own, even if you’re good with numbers. You might make incorrect assumptions about industry dynamics, depreciation, personnel costs, and so on without guidance from someone with a big-picture view of the company’s revenues and expenses.

To reduce these risks, keep your project lean and focused—and frame it as a fact-finding experiment.

Try demonstrating the importance of your business case—to yourself and others—by doing a stealth project as proof of concept.