Business Analysis Templates

Business Case: How to Justify the Business Need in 3 Steps

Posted on by Anthony James

How do you justify the needs for a Business Case?

First, explore the Business Needs as this drives the Business Case. Looking at it from this angle helps justify why there is a need to perform this task. Let’s look at a typical example.

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Business Case: Justify the Business Need

Business Case shows why a project makes financial sense to your company. It helps project stakeholders with project planning and decision-making. For example:

  • What products to buy
  • What vendor to choose
  • When to implement new solutions

Business Case Example

You work for a small bank. One of the problems is the cost to handle checks. You’d prefer to move the customers to credit cards as it lowers the handling costs and lets you focus on high value actives.

To convince your management team that this is worth investing in, you need to show them where, why and how this will succeed. And this is why you need to create a business case.

Business Case Justification

The advantage of the business case is that it helps you:

  • Justify why the investment will return the initial commitment.
  • Show where there will be costs savings.
  • Give examples of how this has worked before for others businesses.

What we are doing here is giving the decision makers enough information to weight up the pros and cons of the investment.

Business Case: Where to Start

You can start the document by looking at the following:

  1. Outcomes – what benefits will the business gain by making this investment. Support this with case studies, white papers and other documentation.
  2. Justifications – you can then reinforce this by illustrating where the business will be more competitive as a result of starting the project. In the bank’s case, you could calculate how much you would save per customer by switching them from checks to credit cards.
  3. Obstacles – you also need to balance the document by showing the difficulties the project may encounter. In some ways this is where you win or lose the argument. If you can address the key problem points with reasonable responses, your business case will be more convincing to the project stakeholders.

Conclusion

Your readers look at the business case as a tool for making go/no go decisions. Your job is to give them enough facts for them to make these calculations and decide whether to progress or not.

Learn more about this MS Word Business Case Template

Anthony James