Blending Business Case with Project Plan

Jacilyn -

I'd keep the detailed stakeholder register separate from your PM Plan as the latter would usually be shared with a much broader audience than the former. However, you can extract just the list of key stakeholders, their contact info and roles relative to the project and include that in the PM Plan.

Kiron

Hi Jacilyn,

I am not sure what you mean by including project plan context in a business case. It is absoulutely a great idea for your organization to have a full business case template, but since a project probably is not going to be inititated until the business case is completed and approved to move forward, where would project plan context come from?

The business case is one of the inputs to a project charter, and the PM Plan is done after the charter is completed and approved.

I would think who to include in a business case in terms of stakeholders would be the responsibility of the person or group creating the business case, and in terms of confidentiality could be handled on a case by case basis. And a business case probably should say who are the key stakeholders. I would include it in the business case template and if you are concerned about people exposing confidential information, that section of the template could come with a warning.

Just to put this in terms of PMI do not forget to take a look to PMI´s business analysis documents, mainly the practice guide. About the business case, I always use (and I teached in trainings) that the driver to create a business case is to remember that people will approve to create a solution to business problem then they must feel they will be more rich with the solution than without it, where rich it does not means more money only. So, the second thing is to know very well the audience. For example, finance people like to see numbers in there. Indeed, a high level timeline has to be included, but a high level only.