Business Case
One of the things we should always watch for, is the Business Case. It’s one of the seven themes in PRINCE2.
Business Case
The
Business Case is a concept that contains the justification of the
project, and its supportive information. We use it for making high-level
decisions, and to see if it’s still beneficial to continue the project.
Do you remember the Manage by Stages principle? OK, let’s discuss the Business Case based on the stages:
Pre-project: it’s not a stage, but a period before we start the
project. We just want to know if it’s a good idea to start the project.
So, we create a simple Business Case. A complete and reliable Business
Case needs a lot of planning; for example, we should know the resource
requirements and schedule. But it’s really expensive to do so for every
idea. That’s why we create an “outline Business Case” in the pre-project
period, which is really rough and high-level. If it was promising,
we’ll move on to the first “stage”.
Initiation stage: the first
stage is initiation, and it simply means “planning”. In this stage, we
prepare a high-level plan for the whole project. Therefore, we would be
able to turn our “outline Business Case” into a real “Business Case”.
Then we check to see if the project is beneficial enough, and if it was,
we will start the second stage, which is the first delivery stage.
Delivery stages: we will have one or more delivery stages after the
initiation stage. During them, we will keep updating the business case
and use it to make the high-level decisions and see if we need to cancel
the project.
It’s
easy to talk about updating the Business Case, but it needs a lot of
work. So, when should we do it? Every week for example? Of course not.
What’s your idea? Tip: we do it for two events.
