Making the Business Case


Book Description

A good business case is so much more than simply the means to justify a decision. A well-written and well-researched business case will secure funding; make sure any project stays on the right side of regulation; mobilize support for the cause; provide the platform for managing the project and the benchmark against which to measure progress. Ian Gambles' Making the Business Case shows you how to make sense of the task at hand, develop a strategy, articulate your options, define the benefits, establish the costs, identify the risks and make a compelling case. Just as with the best business cases, the text is concise, jargon-free and easy to read; illustrated throughout with practical examples drawn from real cases and including reflective exercises at the end of each chapter to help you consolidate what you have learned. At only 198 pages long, this is a jewel of a book; essential reading for the manager tasked with making the business case, the senior manager who needs to understand and test it, and the project manager who is responsible for delivering whatever is agreed on.




HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case


Book Description

"You've got a great idea that will increase revenue or productivity--but how do you get approval to make it happen? By building a business case that clearly shows its value. Maybe you struggle to win support for projects because you're not sure what kind of data your stakeholders will trust, or naysayers always seem to shoot your ideas down at the last minute. Or perhaps you're intimidated by analysis and number crunching, so you just take a stab at estimating costs and benefits, with little confidence in your accuracy. To get any idea off the ground at your company you'll have to make a strong case for it. This guide gives you the tools to do that"--




Making the Software Business Case


Book Description

"Just the understanding and insights you will pick up about how people encounter and cope with combinations of technical, social, political, and economic opportunities and challenges make the book a joy to read and worth much more than the price of it alone." --Barry Boehm, from the Foreword This practical handbook shows you how to build an effective business case when you need to justify--and persuade management to accept--software change or improvement. Based on real-world scenarios, the book covers the most common situations in which business case analyses are required and explains specific techniques that have proved successful in practice. Drawing on years of experience in winning the "battle of the budget," the author shows you how to use commonly accepted engineering economic arguments to make your numbers "sing" to management. The book provides examples of successful business cases; along the way, tables, tools, facts, figures, and metrics guide you through the entire analytic process. Writing in a concise and witty style, the author makes this valuable guidance accessible to every software engineer, manager, and IT professional. Highlights include: How and where business case analyses fit into the software and IT life cycle process Explanations of the most common tools for business case analysis, such as present-value, return-on-investment, break-even, and cost/benefit calculation Tying the business process to the software development life cycle Packaging the business case for management consumption Frameworks and guidelines for justifying IT productivity, quality, and delivery cycle improvement strategies Case studies for applying appropriate decision situations to software process improvement Strategic guidelines for various business case analyses With this book in hand, you will find the facts, examples, hard data, and case studies needed for preparing your own winning business cases in today's complex software environment.




Developing a Business Case


Book Description

How do you decide on the best course of action for your company to take advantage of new opportunities? By building a business case. This book provides a framework for building a business case. You'll learn how to: Clearly define the opportunity you'll want to address in your business case Identify and analyze a range of alternatives Recommend one option and assess its risks Create a high-level implementation plan for your proposed alternative Communicate your case to key stakeholders




The Business Case for Love


Book Description

Love it? Hate it? Or, just don’t care? How we feel about something dramatically affects how we interact with it. When we feel, we care. When we care, things happen. Companies that are thriving, not just surviving, are much more than a set of ruthlessly efficient and mechanistic processes – they are a social system operated by people for people. The quality of relationships, both inside and outside the organization is a far more important driver of sustainable success or failure than the quality of its control systems. The head is important, but it is the heart that matters most. If you want your customers to be brand ambassadors and your employees to brag about you to their friends, you need them to not just think you’re great – you need them to feel you’re great. You need them to love you – and for that, you need them to feel that you love them. For over a decade Marc Cox has been helping companies whose toxic cultures, miserable employees, and angry customers have all but destroyed them to rebuild their company spirit, discover the business case for love and build an organization that is wonderful to work for, brilliant to do business with and has the mindset of creating memorable employee and customer experiences. Underpinned by fresh insights and perspectives, robustly tested and refined by the real world experience of working with a wide range of companies and over 2,000 senior executives drawn from all parts of the world, and filled with fascinating and illustrative “love stories” the book will help you to make the business case for love. It will help you to find a more rewarding and invigorating way of working – both emotionally and financially. In short, it shows what happens when the love is put back into business.




Business Modeling and Software Design


Book Description

This book contains the extended and revised versions of selected papers from the Third International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2013), held in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, during July 8-10, 2013. The symposium was organized and sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology (IICREST), in cooperation with the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS), the Center for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), and AMAKOTA Ltd. The theme of BMSD 2013 was "Enterprise Engineering and Software Generation." The 13 full and 20 short papers presented at BMSD 2013 were selected from 56 submissions. The eight papers published in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from the 13 full papers. The selection includes papers touching upon a large number of research topics, ranging from more conceptual ones, such as modeling landscapes, process modeling, declarative business rules, and normalized systems to more practical ones, such as business-case development and performance indicators, and from more business-related topics, such as value modeling and service systems, to topics related to information architectures.




Too Big to Ignore


Book Description

Residents in Boston, Massachusetts are automatically reporting potholes and road hazards via their smartphones. Progressive Insurance tracks real-time customer driving patterns and uses that information to offer rates truly commensurate with individual safety. Google accurately predicts local flu outbreaks based upon thousands of user search queries. Amazon provides remarkably insightful, relevant, and timely product recommendations to its hundreds of millions of customers. Quantcast lets companies target precise audiences and key demographics throughout the Web. NASA runs contests via gamification site TopCoder, awarding prizes to those with the most innovative and cost-effective solutions to its problems. Explorys offers penetrating and previously unknown insights into healthcare behavior. How do these organizations and municipalities do it? Technology is certainly a big part, but in each case the answer lies deeper than that. Individuals at these organizations have realized that they don't have to be Nate Silver to reap massive benefits from today's new and emerging types of data. And each of these organizations has embraced Big Data, allowing them to make astute and otherwise impossible observations, actions, and predictions. It's time to start thinking big. In Too Big to Ignore, recognized technology expert and award-winning author Phil Simon explores an unassailably important trend: Big Data, the massive amounts, new types, and multifaceted sources of information streaming at us faster than ever. Never before have we seen data with the volume, velocity, and variety of today. Big Data is no temporary blip of fad. In fact, it is only going to intensify in the coming years, and its ramifications for the future of business are impossible to overstate. Too Big to Ignore explains why Big Data is a big deal. Simon provides commonsense, jargon-free advice for people and organizations looking to understand and leverage Big Data. Rife with case studies, examples, analysis, and quotes from real-world Big Data practitioners, the book is required reading for chief executives, company owners, industry leaders, and business professionals.




How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life


Book Description

Becoming a partner in a professional services firm is for many ambitious fee-earners the ultimate goal. But in this challenging industry, with long hours, high pressure and even higher expectations, how do you stand out from the crowd? How do you build the most effective relationships? And how do you find the time to do all of this and still have a fulfilling personal life? Now in its third edition, How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life equips individuals at the start of their career through to partner with the skills needed to reach and succeed at the leadership level. How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life details the expectations and realities of being a partner and outlines how you can continue to achieve once you have obtained the much-coveted role. This edition is updated with guidance on developing the right mindset for success and the importance of mentoring and sponsorship. There is a specific focus on women and BAME professionals and the challenges faced by individuals coming from non-traditional or under-represented backgrounds. Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie provide a guide to help you tackle common obstacles and work smarter - not harder - to reach the top. Start your journey to partnership and still have the time for a life outside of work.




How to Write a Great Business Plan


Book Description

Judging by all the hoopla surrounding business plans, you'd think the only things standing between would-be entrepreneurs and spectacular success are glossy five-color charts, bundles of meticulous-looking spreadsheets, and decades of month-by-month financial projections. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, often the more elaborately crafted a business plan, the more likely the venture is to flop. Why? Most plans waste too much ink on numbers and devote too little to information that really matters to investors. The result? Investors discount them. In How to Write a Great Business Plan, William A. Sahlman shows how to avoid this all-too-common mistake by ensuring that your plan assesses the factors critical to every new venture: The people—the individuals launching and leading the venture and outside parties providing key services or important resources The opportunity—what the business will sell and to whom, and whether the venture can grow and how fast The context—the regulatory environment, interest rates, demographic trends, and other forces shaping the venture's fate Risk and reward—what can go wrong and right, and how the entrepreneurial team will respond Timely in this age of innovation, How to Write a Great Business Plan helps you give your new venture the best possible chances for success.




Business Case Essentials


Book Description

A brief but complete outline of what belongs in a business case and why it belongs. It assumes no prior background in finance or business planning. The focus is on questions like these: How do I prove that one choice is the best business decision? How do I show that all important costs and benefits are included? How do I show that alternative action proposals are compared fairly? How do I establish value for benefits--even non financial benefits? How do I build a business case when I am in a government or non profit organization? How do I minimize risk and show management how to maximize business results?