The Realistic Business Case

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Business Case   Strategy  

The business case may be more abused than the status report. We all know that status reports are abused documents for project managers—“creative” reporting, optimistic (or pessimistic) traffic signal reports and the minimum amount of effort required to keep stakeholders off of our backs. Well, business cases are frequently worse--and in this article I want to call out those issues and suggest ways that organizations can address those problems in a way that restores business cases to being valuable documents.

The problem--at project selection
Project business cases are intended to present the costs and benefits of a proposed initiative and demonstrate that the investment that is required to execute the project is worthwhile in terms of the benefits that will be achieved. In a perfect world, that is a purely objective process--here’s what the project will cost, here’s what the project will deliver, please make a decision to invest or otherwise. That’s a little overly simplistic; costs and benefits have to consider money and people, the timing and duration of costs and benefits, the opportunity costs, etc. But at a fundamental level, it should be about whether the return on investment is worthwhile.

In reality, things don’t work that way because projects are rarely considered in isolation. Most organizations have an annual …

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