When you are building a business case, you want to use every tool to help strengthen it and get the results your organization needs from the project you’re proposing. This is an excellent time to deploy business analysis techniques to help describe the needed changes, strategize your approach, plan around obstacles, and outline a successful solution. In this post, we’ll reach a better understanding of how business analysis and the business case intersect. Here’s how to build a better business case through business analysis.

Key Business Analysis Tools and The Business Case

Business analysis is a practice that helps facilitate change in an organization by identifying needs and determining potential solutions, ultimately improving the business’ value. Trained business analysis practitioners rely on the proven practices and techniques defined by the International Institute of Business Analysis’™ (IIBA®) A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK® Guide). The BABOK Guide offers a collection of best practices, knowledge, and skills needed for the effective execution of business analysis. The structure is organized into six knowledge areas (KA) that represent specific BA expertise and tasks. The knowledge areas are interrelated as an organization undergoes a change:

1. BA Planning and Monitoring – organizes and coordinates BA efforts, then provides outputs that lay out the approach that will be used for the specific effort
2. Strategy Analysis – focuses on defining the future and transition states needed to address the need and the BA’s role in these activities
3. Requirements Life Cycle Management – makes sure that requirements and designs are in alignment and met by the final solution
4. Elicitation and Collaboration – describes tasks performed to get information from stakeholders and to confirm the results
5. Requirements Analysis and Design Definition – focuses on structuring and organizing the requirements and recommending a solution
6. Solution Evaluation – analyzes the actual solution, looking at the value being delivered

As we’ve discussed in the past, the overarching goal of a good business case is to focus a project by providing justification for its intent and process. For this reason, a business case is only as good as the thought and research that goes into it. The BABOK Guide brings added rigor to any change and is useful during all four phases of a good business case outline. Every organization has a slightly different template for the business case. Still, the main components generally include a business need or problem statement, situation analysis, recommendations, and evaluation.

Among the tools included in the BABOK Guide is the Business Analysis Core Concept Model^TM (BACCM^TM), which describes the conceptual framework for business analysis. The model relies on a non-hierarchical circle of six concepts – changes, needs, solutions, stakeholders, value, and context. It encompasses all BA tasks, regardless of perspective, industry, methodology, or level. The six concepts are equal and necessary. Within the BACCM, each concept is related to the others, so if one concept shifts for a given change, all others should be reviewed for potential shifts.

Critical components in developing a business case include a business need statement and a thorough analysis of the current situation. When the core concept model is applied to a business case, it can help clarify which questions need to be asked. These questions might include:

• Changes – What changes are needed?
• Needs – How well are current business needs being met?
• Solutions – Does the solution work? Does it deliver value? If not, why?
• Stakeholders – Who are the key stakeholders? How can the project demonstrate value to them?
• Value – What constitutes value in this project? How can we maximize it?
• Context – How does the context of the effort affect the solution? Does the context potentially limit the value?

Analytical Tools and the Business Case

After working through the BACCM to develop a business need statement, the next step in writing a solid business case is to conduct an analysis of the situation. All organizations have goals and objectives, and strategies for achieving them. A good business case will speak directly to those goals and objectives. In the analysis, you will provide more details about the problem, spelling out how the problem and proposal line up with each other and with your organization’s strategic direction.

Identifying the root causes or contributing factors to the problem helps to ensure you have accurately defined the problem in the first place. Once you know the root causes, you can also pinpoint strategies to target these. We deploy several BA tools to determine the most appropriate plan to achieve the organization’s goals:

• Decision Analysis helps your decision-makers when faced with complex and problematic situations. This tool hones in on the problem to be solved and provides the details necessary to make informed decisions.
• Estimation provides estimates of time, cost, and resources needed.
• A Review of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provides ways to measure outcomes and performance, ensuring measurable, tangible, quantitative benefits.
• Risk Analysis looks at both the threats and the opportunities that an organization faces, either with an unsolved problem or during a project, identifying high-level risks which will impact the proposal.
• Gap Analysis examines the gaps between the current state (where you are now) and the future state (where you want to be). It identifies where you should target solutions and task improvements to cover gaps.
• Root Cause Analysis looks at problems and tries to identify underlying issues, or root causes, to determine the real problems that need to be addressed.
• A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threat (SWOT) Analysis provides a framework for identifying an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. With a SWOT, you can craft a business case proposal that takes advantage of your strengths to meet your opportunities.
• A Vendor Assessment provides a critical review of potential vendors to ensure they can do what the organization needs them to do. Few organizations can do everything alone. A vendor assessment helps you select a vendor’s solution as part of your recommendation based on that vendor’s past performance and history.

Why Involve a Business Analyst in Business Case Development?

What is the best reason for involving a business analyst as you draft a business case? Crafting the business case entails answering various questions as you flesh out your proposal and call on a variety of tools and techniques. The main goal of any business case is a go or no-go decision, so enough details need to be provided to inform that decision.

More and more, budgets are scrutinized, and executives are asked to justify spending. As a result, pursuing the right proposals and prioritizing the more valuable projects is critical for any organization. A well-crafted business case can provide the information your organization needs to make truly informed decisions about spending its limited resources and which projects to pursue. Business analysts are, by definition, exceptionally knowledgeable about the business environment across a spectrum of sectors and industries. They are uniquely positioned to assess the criteria influencing your decisions, identify critical success factors, highlight the changes that signal goal achievement, and outline the options and potential solutions available to your organization.

With the completion of more than 200 successful projects using Momentum’s BABOK Guide-based approach to projects, Momentum has produced and retained a library of various practices, tools, and templates to assist clients in their needs. This gives us a unique opportunity to pull these practices, tools, and templates from our existing library and, if necessary, customize them to align with any existing methodology. To learn more, subscribe to Momentum’s news and blog portal.