Lesson learned project sponsors may not have the business case figured out
- 1. You’ve got your IT investment business case ready, but how ‘ready’ is it? By Tom Greene, Oracle America I have met with hundreds of IT project leads, proposers and sponsors in the last two decades of my career. Invariably, these business and IT leaders are faced with a laundry list of IT investment opportunities that COULD be pursued. Some of them actually SHOULD be addressed soon and some of them have champions who say they MUST be addressed now! Amidst the clamor of these competing voices, these folks are faced with a full plate already: IT projects already underway, managing and supporting what’s in place, business changes and initiatives to be pursued, staff to be hired and trained, etc. On top of that, every IT investment has to be carried through the same “percolating process” to get requirements defined, business owner buy in, initial space in the budget, and then packaged with the necessary scope, resourcing and justification for executive review at the E-Staff, Board or Steering Committee. So, not surprisingly, I see these folks struggle to find the time and information in order to build out the most compelling business case justification for their proposals. They have been talking about this “project” for months and THEY ‘know’ why it is needed, but, the business case justifications I’ve seen often suffers from one or these common flaws: Too IT-centric: IT leaders can clearly see and quantify the savings that come from consolidating systems, retiring legacy infrastructure or standardizing on common technology. The harder part is to define how this investment will impact business metrics, business performance and functional productivity across the business. Too Productivity-Focused: Many business-generated justifications I have seen are heavily focused on productivity savings. This may be the easiest impact to articulate, but it’s also sometimes the hardest one to achieve because employees replace the time spent doing basic tasks with time spent doing advanced functions. The result is that no productivity gains materialize. Productivity can also be a controversial measure to focus on if an executive were to ask “which two people are YOU laying off to get these savings?” Qualitative, but not Quantified: Sometimes, I see some well-developed articulation of the impact on the business in terms of business metrics such as: retention, cost per hire, inventory reduction or reduced scrap and excess. However, I also see how hard it is to project the quantified value of these improvements without any benchmark data or experience to draw on. Quantified, but TOO conservative: The final pitfall occurs when the benefits have been quantified, but at overly-conservative levels. There are two reasons for this. First, there can be natural fear of ‘signing up for a firm #’ where executives will hold the project leader to the savings they project. The other reason goes back to the lack of specific benchmarks or experience to define what amount of improvements is possible… “Is 20% inventory reduction reasonable? Can we reduce churn by this amount?” In my role as a Value Consultant within Oracle’s Application sales team in North America, I help customers prepare business case justification for their proposed IT investments. I have the luxury of leveraging a value calculation model built on improvement benchmarks developed over 20 years of experience. I also get the opportunity to repeat this process about 30 times per year and learn from the experience of each case. And perhaps most of all, I have the luxury of making the business case development my prime focus, leveraging our tools and dedicated resources and broad experience to
- 2. help a customer develop a detailed, quantified and compelling business case that is truly ready for presentation to executives. Tom Greene is Value Director in Oracle’s Mid-Market Application Sales team based out of Santa Clara, CA. Tom has spent the last 20 years advising hundreds of potential and existing Oracle applications customers on their IT investment decisions.