Making an initiative decision-ready: business case and paper.

In many organisations the business case is a form: investment, running costs, expected benefit, payback. The figures are calculated cleanly, and still nothing happens after the paper — or a decision is taken and reopened six months later.

The reason is usually the same: the calculation rests on assumptions that never appear in the document. How many cases per month? How much time does one case save? How high is the adoption rate in the first year? As long as these figures stay invisible, the committee is deciding on a number whose derivation it cannot judge. If an assumption later fails to materialise, it looks like an error instead of a known risk.

The remedy is unspectacular: assumptions get a section of their own, each with a value, a source and a range. And it is shown which assumption tips the result. If a single figure determines whether the initiative is worth doing, that is the most important information in the whole paper.

The section that is missing most often and carries the most weight: what happens if nothing is done? Not phrased as a threat, but verifiable. Useful questions for this:

• Which costs continue to accrue that the initiative would remove?
• Which deadlines are running out — regulatory, contractual, or because a system is reaching the end of its support?
• Which effort grows over time because interim solutions have to be maintained further?
• Which decision becomes more expensive or impossible through waiting?
• What happens if a competitor or a regulator acts first?
• If none of these questions has a robust answer, waiting may well be the right decision. That too is a result.

A paper that only does the financial arithmetic usually gets approved and then fails in delivery. Every business case therefore needs a section that business units like to leave out: what must the organisation be able to do for the calculated benefit to materialise?

In concrete terms, three points. First, the prerequisites — which systems, interfaces, data or approvals have to be in place? Second, the people involved: whose way of working changes, and who has agreed to that change? Third, operations: who runs the result afterwards, and at what effort?

These three points cost a few paragraphs and prevent the most common disappointment: that an initiative is approved whose benefit hangs on a prerequisite that nobody owns.