Business cases are tricky matters. Specially within the multi-layered ecosystem of an enterprise organisation where competing for budget is the hot game. In some corporations, competition is so intense that huge amounts of energy and resources go toward winning the budget over other departments. This is at the expense of ending up with silos and sabotaging the spirit of “one-team”.
The Art of Convincing
And despite many start-ups and smaller organisations embracing new technology or new ways of operation more organically, in larger corporations the rate of truly embracing innovation is as slow as the internal change. So, there is an art to “convincing the big bosses” in larger organisations.
But since every team and department is already competing for their share of the budget, the head of departments or the senior levels of a business function are always looking for opportunities to be convinced on a new piece of technology, a new way of improving the process or a new tool. There is a win-win dynamic going on when you want to present your business case.
To your advantage, the business case for a great deal of mainstream new technology like cloud, microservices and DevOps is pretty compelling. So, there should be a workable set of strategies to “winning hearts” of big bosses.
Business Case Strategy
And for that, I can easily summarize the strategies for a compelling business case as following:
- Start with the data:
- get the data straight so you can measure the success of your business case against it
- Understand your why
- Explore north-south and east-west of the whys for your idea, your idea should try to be aligned with other business objectives
- Define the experiment
- Find the sweet spot in your ecosystem for your experiment to be effective, measurable and appealing, all at the same time
- Be precise in what you are asking
- Work backwards from the “why”
- Make sure these are clear and understandable in your business case:
- Premise and problem domain
- Risks and consequences
- Your solution to those problems
- The potential business outcomes
- And finally your “ask”
The Infinite Game
When you see an 85” 4K TV in a mall, you will intuitively ask yourself “why do I need that?”. There is always big value in coming up with the business case because as you are navigating the art of convincing big bosses, you are also having a good go at “The Why” which can be absolutely useful in your long game.