Visualizing the Business Case
Visualize Feature image from Flickr Commons
Contributed by Joseph Raynus
You spent a lot of hours developing a Business Case for a product that, in your view, matches organization's strategic goals and objectives with proposed solution targeted to provide great benefits to your company. In your Business Case you described how product will grow, how to align resources, and what budget for the product will be required to move forward.You prepared the presentation and everything looked very good in your PowerPoint! Finally the day has come. You presented your Business Case and what a disappointment: your vision, your supporting information, and well-researched data has drowned in a swamp of misunderstanding, conflicting opinions, disagreements, and biased arguments. There seemed to be no clarity and common understanding of your presentation rendering your efforts worthless. As a result, there was no buy-in from senior management, key stakeholders, and even cross-functional team.Luckily, your ideas were not rejected outright, but now you have to go back to the drawing board and figure out the way how to present this information in a clear, concise and uniform way that will be understood by all.
Image provided by ShareDynamics
You need to "visualize and structure" your story to make it compelling! Visualizing and structuring your ideas can help you organize multiple "story domains" into clear and concise form that allows for more open participation by anyone who can help get a group of stakeholders to come to a common understanding of your story. It will also require that you group and categorize ideas since you want to visually show how things work. Storyboarding helped you to organize multiple ideas and concepts. It allowed for more open participation by anyone who can help get the group to a common idea. Storyboarding will also require that you group and categorize ideas since you want to visually show how things work.Your story is a story of a Business Case that should show how investment in your ideas will bring benefits and value to the organization, how the program is going to be planned, monitored, and executed. The story brought together stakeholders and articulated goals and strategies of the proposed program and its desired outcomes.
Communicate your story using Business Case Canvas! Working with my clients and facilitating numerous workshops on Business Case development, I realized that there is a great need for visual representation of this type of information, which I called Business Case Canvas.Business Case Canvas helped us maintain a sense of direction, visually representing information about goals, objectives, strategies, and proposed implementation options that enable common understanding of the proposal.The Business Case canvas not just shows obvious information but also represents your thinking process behind a proposed program and provides ability for alignment of program goals and objectives with activities that need to be performed in order to achieve expected benefits.Do you need to get a buy-in on your project strategy and a roadmap? Map your story on a Business Case canvas and enjoy your success!
Joseph Raynus, an international speaker, author, trainer, and consultant, is a leading practitioner who brings a unique blend of practical hands-on experience with innovative ideas and solutions to deal with the real-world challenges of complex environments. He is a recognized expert in business process management, strategic program and project planning and management as well as quantitative performance management. Joseph is a founder of ShareDynamics, Inc., specializing in training and consulting in the subject of Strategic Planning, Performance Management, and Business Process Improvement.