Understand the Business Case

Transcript

As a manager, it’s your goal to make sure projects contribute to the overall goals and initiatives of the company in a positive way. In order to make informed decisions, you need information from your project managers about what they will need for their projects to move forward. This can be done through the business case. Think of a business case as a blueprint or proposal for the work that needs to be done. It captures high-level preliminary estimates that help you plan and manage portfolios. It’s where potential expenses, resources, and risks are entered to build a case for why this project would benefit the company. In the project, just click the Business Case tab to find the business case. Each section of the business case provides unique and important information about the project. They feed information to the Portfolio Optimization tool, which will help you compare and prioritize projects in your portfolio. Most of the information entered into the Project Info section involves general project details, such as the project sponsor. To edit it, just click on Edit Project Info. There’s one piece of information that could affect the project’s prioritization – the Planned Benefit. The Planned Benefit represents the estimated dollar amount your company might benefit from if the project is completed. Enter it here and it will appear in the Business Case Summary as well. You’ll normally want to set the status of the project to IDEA when filling out the business case. This way it won’t show up on reports with requested or approved projects. After all, at this stage it’s just an IDEA. You can list the project goals here, but keep in mind that these goals are for information only, and are separate from the Workfront Goals feature. Expenses represent the non-labor costs that may be incurred during the life of the project, like payments for travel and booth rental. See how this adds to the budgeted cost and subtracts from the net value. The Resource Budgeting section lets you estimate the labor you think will be needed for the project to move forward. This information is pulled from the Resource Planner. You must have Resource Pools set up in Workfront to use this section of the business case. Notice how the resource budgeting amount is added to the budgeted costs. Next are Risks. It’s important to identify risks to the project and plan for them accordingly. For risks where you can estimate the cost of the risk that occurs and the probability that it will occur, be sure and enter these values. Workfront will multiply the potential cost by the probability and put that in the potential risk fund that will be subtracted from the project’s planned benefit when calculating its net value. Next is Scorecards. Scorecards can help you determine how well a proposed project aligns with the overall goals and initiatives for the portfolio. Each Scorecard has a list of questions and answers that have values attached to them. When the Scorecard is filled out, Workfront can calculate how aligned the project is with the portfolio’s predetermined goals. Now we see the alignment value appearing in the Business Case Summary. Scorecards are created by a System Administrator in Setup. Project Managers won’t be able to see the values assigned to each answer. Only the System Administrators can see these values. You can also choose a Project Custom Form if one has been created for the use in the Business Case. Once the Business Case is filled out, click the Submit button in the Summary panel. This will change the project status to Requested and will calculate the overall score of this project. The score will be helpful when comparing projects in the Portfolio Optimization Tool. The Business Case can be flexible, depending on how your organization chooses to use it. None of the fields are required. However, the more information you fill out, the easier it is for Managers to analyze and prioritize projects vying for the same budget or resources.