A Value Proposition

Tom Mochal, PgMP, PMP, TSPM is the president of TenStep, Inc., a methodology development, consulting and training company. Tom won the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Project Management Institute for his work spreading knowledge of project management around the world. He is a speaker, lecturer, instructor and consultant to companies and organizations around the world.

  Decision Making   Estimating   Leadership   Portfolio Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Many potential projects that are considered for funding will ultimately not be approved despite significant time and effort spent on their business cases. Starting with a Value Proposition document can help weed out the less promising projects before a more detailed business case is necessary.

Your executive team needs good solid information when they make decisions about the internal projects to undertake in the next fiscal year. This “solid” information normally comes through a Business Case. The Business Case describes the business benefit of work along with the costs, risks, assumptions, constraints, etc. The Business Case is a rigorous document that provides enough context and detail so that an appropriate business decision can be made on the viability, benefit and alignment of a project.

The problem with the Business Case is that it requires a lot of work. This work is fine if there is a decent likelihood that the project will get approved. However, there are many potential projects that are considered for funding that will ultimately not be approved. To a certain extent, the work to create a Business Case can be wasted if the project does not stand at least a decent chance to be approved.

A good technique for approving projects for the portfolio is to do the selection in two steps. First, a high-level Value Proposition …

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