Business Case Management
Carry out robust benefit evaluation with business case management software
What is business case software?
A business case provides justification for initiating an idea, project or task.
It evaluates the expected costs, risks, and business benefits, and is considered an essential tool to optimizing benefit realization. It acts as a way to evaluate and prototype ideas against the rigorous criteria that project managers need to execute and deliver a well performing project.
Business case software acts as the missing link between your innovation and PMO teams, enabling ideas to be turned into actionable project plans.
The benefits of business case management software
Business case software enables you to centralize, standardize and easily govern how you capture and progress business cases. All teams know exactly where to look for approval and project managers can easily refer back to ensure project implementations are on track and delivering the expected benefits.
It also enables organizations to spot trends and identify bottlenecks before executing projects and acts as a tool for evidence-based decision making.
Business case software can:
- Present a repeatable method of capturing business case data
- Improve collaboration across your organization
- Accelerate evaluation and approval
- Provide accurate forecasting for benefit realization
- Enable rapid evaluation of ideas with easy identification of ROI
- Allow greater transparency within the project pipeline
- Standardize the approval process for ideas of all shapes and sizes.
edison365 business case software is unique
edison365businesscase enables organizations to carry out comprehensive business case analysis, using a tool based on the familiar Microsoft 365 interface. It’s part of our suite and is designed to improve transparency and collaboration.
Easily connected to the rest of the edison365 suite, you can evaluate ideas captured by innovation management software – edison365ideas – then turn them into actionable projects defined by your ways of working in edison365projects.
Business case software tracks benefit realization
By adopting business case software, you gain a set of common standards, with the aim of democratizing, socializing and optimizing the process to make it easier for everyone involved.
You might end up with multiple business case formats, but there should be standardization of data sets, types and metrics across all of them. When everyone is looking at the same data in the same formats, it is much easier to have a common view of progress against benefits realization across the entire portfolio of business cases.
Once a business case has been approved, project managers should be able to translate it into a project plan with greater ease, efficiency and transparency.
Standardizing the project pipeline: Aster Group
Aster Group, adopted business case management software to standardize their processes and are seeing improvements to the way in which they approve and prioritize projects within the pipeline.
Aster Group, adopted business case management software to standardize their processes and are seeing improvements to the way in which they approve and prioritize projects within the pipeline.
- Derek Wilkes, Assistant Director of PMO, Aster Group.
Connecting with the grassroots: The Salvation Army
The Salvation Army is using business case software to connect the grassroots to the gatekeepers within its organization. This offers its volunteers the ability to submit ideas then have stakeholders evaluate them against their strategic priorities at a corporate level.
“Within a non-profit, people can often be very risk averse so having a method to not only gather ideas, but to have the ability to demonstrate the value of them and scale them helps removes the risk"
- Steven Bussey, Territorial Mission Strategist, The Salvation Army
FAQs
What should be included in a business case?
The elements you’re required to include in your business case may depend on your organization’s in-house processes, but most include the following:
- A brief overview of each area of your business case, known as an ‘executive summary’
- The project objectives and how they fulfil business need
- An outline of the project plan
- The project scope – all the tasks and deliverables that will be executed as part of the project
- The background information around the business case, including the problem it will solve and who the key stakeholders in the business are
- The projected benefits of the project (including non-monetary benefits) and its success criteria
- The cost and potential risks of completing the project, including how they will be mitigated
- The implementation strategy
What is the importance of a business case?
A business case is used to evaluate potential projects against the criteria that project managers need to execute against, such as benefit realization and time constraints.
Completing a business case is essential for providing transparency around the resources needed and setting out clear goals. It also enables you to prioritize those potential projects that will provide the most value for your company – particularly useful if resources are stretched.
Who uses business case management software?
Business case management software is used by enterprise businesses to provide justification for projects or tasks. It enables organizations to compare the costs, risks and benefits of different ideas, and choose that that will provide the greatest value.
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