Making a recommendation? Whether you’re doing a formal business case or a quick paper for your boss, here are 5 things that you should make sure are covered.
1. Present the options
What are the options you have considered before making your recommendation? Normally you’ll have at least 3:
- Do nothing (what happens if nothing happens – if your project is legal or regulatory you might not have a do nothing option)
- Do something (minimum intervention)
- Do more than the minimum.
Write a few sentences about each, or if you are doing a verbal presentation, spend a moment outlining each.
The option chosen should be practical and deliverable. In fact, all the options should be reasonable – suggesting pointless activity is a waste of time and undermines your credibility. There’s no point putting forward an option to deliver 100% improved customer service if it needs an investment of £2m and you know there is no way your company is going to go for that.
2. Present the choice
Next, say which one of your reasonable options you are putting forward.
Explain why. Be clear and don’t assume they know anything about any of the analysis or thinking. What’s the obvious choice to you might not be clear to them.
Explain why the other choices are not appropriate to pursue at this time. You don’t want to spend loads of time on explaining why you have discounted them, but you might need to justify the financials so link out to (or have to hand if you are presenting) info that stakeholders can use to look at the detail.
Hopefully they won’t need it as they should trust that you’ve consulted the right people and made a sensible choice.
3. Present the benefits
Review the benefits that come with the chosen option and make sure you can justify them. Are they clear, measurable and reasonable? Are there benefits that look good on paper associated with the rejected options that you should explain? Normally, business leaders go for the ‘biggest benefit’ choice so if you aren’t selecting that one, be sure you have clearly justified why not.
Don’t over-estimate the benefits because of all the sections in this presentation or paper, the benefits are the thing most managers will remember. They’ll be looking to you to deliver those, so I would recommend being on the cautious side!
4. Check the language
The decision might go up the chain to people who don’t know the jargon of your department. Check through your proposal or presentation script and make sure you’ve explained any acronyms or project-related terminology that other people might not understand – or that they might interpret incorrectly.
Get someone else to read it through if you are worried that you’re so in the detail that you won’t be able to pick out terms that someone else can’t understand.
5. Read through your recommendation again
If you were presenting this to a family member or non-project manager friend, would they understand your justification for the choice? It should be clear that you have chosen the obvious winner and that you can explain why that is the most appropriate choice at this time for your business. If there is any doubt, go through and strengthen the language.
Finally, check for spelling and grammar errors, and make sure that people’s names and job titles are spelled correctly. Circulate the paper for comment amongst your subject matter experts if it is something you need to get input on, and then send it off to your boss or whoever needs to see it.
The decision maker might not agree with you, but you can be sure they’ve seen the best possible justification and case for the choice.
Community Champion
