This section is designed to
explain my approach and experience to writing business cases. I've called it a
special case since it uses basic financial skills but then at the same time, it
needs to have business skills in report writing the assessment of the business
requirement, the resources required, and the risks and mitigations inherent in
the project.
A particularly relevant part
of this skillset comes in the form of strategic business planning that comes
with raising funds from external sources, since essentially what you are doing
is drafting the business case for an external funder to advance funds as
opposed to an internal funder in the shape of a budget holder or finance
director. Put into that context, writing a business case for internal stakeholders
is the same as writing a business plan for external stakeholders and so should
surely form a similar pattern.Therefore, lets assume that what we are talking about here is the operational
business plan for internal stakeholders (that is the business case) and the strategic
plan for external stakeholders (something like a prospectus).
My experiences with this
latter definition are explored in raising funds from
external sources. With this operational type, I have been involved with
business case preparation, financial support or a sort of audit function at Interconnect for its R&D activities and
marketing tactics (see also financial
modelling for more on this), at Automatic Minibars
for its marketing initiatives, Bookham
Technology for the business case to commercialise its R&D projects into
full-scale manufacturing and sale, and at Sainsburys in the decision-making as to whether to
procure IT products and services.
The Olympic
Delivery Authority employ a business case approach
for to decide between choices for the construction of its venues. Since the ODA
is not a profit-making organisation, the NPV of a project is not necessarily
the most important factor in making a decision - in fact the ODA have several,
non-profit, objectives that a sucessful option in a
business case must satisfy, including environmental sustainability, social
impact and legacy as well as cost. This is a theme that persists throughout all
public sector business case analysis and is a theme known as
"cross-cutting". This is a term borrowed from the IT industry that is
used to describe the aspects of a program that affect, or crosscut,
other concerns.
Closely allied with the
subject of business cases is project accounting.
Often, where a business case is written, it is in support of a project proposal
of some sort, whether that project is in the form of a business (as discussed
above), a new product or a project. Of course the accounting requirements of
the business that is a project is what this whole website is about and where the
product is a project, its covered by the section implement
or improve financial reporting.