Customer Reviews

The Business Case Checklist: Everything You Need to Review a Business Case, Avoid Failed Projects, and Turn Technology into ROI

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I've found this book to be extremely useful. I realized a few years ago how important the business case is to designing effective IT solutions, and read several books and online articles trying to learn from others' insights. Several of the books that I consulted are listed in this book's bibliography. Their treatment of the business case has been distilled into an easily assimilated summary, which is deployed as a tool that can be used for maximizing financial returns on technological investments, as well as for guarding against falling prey to fraudulent promises.
The tool is a checklist.
In December 2007, The New Yorker magazine published surgeon and author Atul Gawande's article, "The Checklist", in which he describes intensive care specialist Peter Pronovost's successful campaign to reduce infection, disease and death in one hospital's ICU (intensive care unit) by introducing a pre-silicon, much maligned and seldom deployed tool: the checklist. He began with a 5-step checklist capturing the simple but necessary precautions against infections resulting from line insertion (like a urinary catheter or abdominal drain). Using that checklist for one month to monitor a hospital medical staff's line insertions, ICU nurses found that doctors omitted at least one step in more than one-third of the cases. Over the next year, nurses, who were authorized to intervene if they saw doctors skipping a step in the checklist, reduced the infection rate from 11% to zero. Over two years, use of this simple5-step checklist prevented 43 infections and 8 deaths, and saved the hospital two million dollars in costs.
I don't know if it was triggered by Gawande's article - his article is not mentioned in the bibliography, though his book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, is - but this book is a brilliant application of checklists to the business case. Stating the business case is a little-appreciated aspect of acquiring and selling information technology, or I should say that I have found that introducing the business case in a sales discussion brings both clarity and appreciation for both sides. The book's advice is presented in such a way that the same business case checklist can be used by both the vendor and the consumer of IT services and technology. Both need to consider the business case as a tool to help them make informed, smart decisions regarding capital expenditure.
12 steps are identified as essential to stating the business case, from understanding the context for perceived needs, to assessment of alternative solutions, to establishing criteria for the final go/no-go decision.
Its central message is simple: understand a technology's features and functions in terms of how it will be used, and in terms of its benefits. IT professionals like me think we know what that means, but we often overlook one or two aspects because we are distracted by improvements or breakthroughs that have more immediate, obvious, or "wow" consequences. The Business Case Checklist works as a restraint against such over-enthusiasm.
It reiterates that information technology is an investment, and should be treated as such. This is a given where huge sums of money are involved, as in large-scale, long-term defense contracts. But IRR (internal rate of return) and of NPV (net present value) are relevant for any project. Both are discussed here clearly and succinctly. If your company does not track the cost of capital, reading this will persuade you to initiate the practice.
There are some pithy, memorable expressions throughout this very well-written book. I expect some of them will find their way into corporate presentations. A few candidates:
"The principle is to reduce the probability of bad events through active management."
"Clarity is a gateway standard."
"Avoid unsubstantiated statements."
I don't see anything in this book that is unnecessary; everything works toward establishing a high- quality baseline for evaluating the worth of IT investments.

This book offers a concise yet actionable solution to the common problem of IT projects that don't deliver business value.

The checklist format works well in boiling down a lot of practical information. It's a time saving, well researched, and crisply written book.

I can see The Business Case Checklist working well for any major or complex IT project. It will help you make good investments, but just as importantly, it will help you screen out bad investments. Given some of the ROI claims out in the market, this is a very important function.

This title is expensive, but very useful---guarantee the reader will find a good idea or something not thought of previously on every page. Highly recommended.

Mainly written for things like large software acquisitions, but I use it when writing business requirements for major projects. Forces me to think about what is really important when making large investments. Makes your business case structured and compelling, but needs more on ownership and managing stakeholders in the decision process.

This is a super tool for anyone who has to build the best practices around using business cases to evaluate project business cases. I am working on developing project lifecycle business case practices and this tool hit it out of the park for me.

While this is positioned as an IT investment Business Case tool - I simply substituted "Change Proposal" for "IT Investments" and it works wonderfully for any investment proposal. Very little is specific to IT - make sure that your proposal is appropriate to the NPV evaluation (the author makes this clear) and watch out for a slight overemphasis on "Technology" and you will be good to go.

I spent literally hundreds of dollars on five other full books about the Business Case in addition to this one and did not find them as helpful as this. Start here, then spend more if you feel you need more theoretical detail (say about the very specific workings of developing the cash flow evaluation models). This is very complete as to the why's and the best practice processes for effectively creating and assessing business cases. It is not focused on the details of financial modeling for business cases - look elsewhere for that.

Any project undertaken should have sound business reasoning why it's required and what the investment in the project would yield. This book provides a template that, once completed, would produce a concise, readable and understandable document that any reader can comprehend. If you are convinced that your project is important, you should follow the Business Case Checklist. It will force you to think in business terms and provide you with sound reasoning that business people can understand. If your business case is compelling, you will find that not only would business people support you, they would become your advocates throughout the organization. A very good place to start from.

This book is a big time saver. Instead of searching around for a framework to review IT proposals, ROI models, and business cases, it provides a tight, logical way to assess any IT initiative.

The book is built around the checklist format. It's professional and rigorous -- not a cheap template that hasn't been thought through.

The checklist has 12 questions, or steps, that you use to score an investment. Step 11 grades the business case and Step 12 requires a decision: Do we invest? There's an investment quality score and a business case quality. Combined, they help you make the right investment decision. The focus of the checklist is business and financial (the way technology decisions should be made), but all the critical questions are addressed, including:

-- The Business Need
-- The Investment
-- The Technology
-- Benefits and costs
-- Risks
-- Valuation
-- Feasibility and fit
-- Alternatives (a typical weakness of IT decisions)
-- Investment execution

Making the checklist work in practice is made easier because half the book is given to best practices for implementing each step of the checklist.

Though the book is short, every word is useful and has more insight and practical value than any other book I have read in this area.

The author appears to have read all the books in this area, so, it's also a cheap way to get the benefits of the research. Plus the book has an e-mail address for questions and comments. I have found this an added benefit.