Filed under: Intranets
Many web and intranet teams will be expected to create business cases at some point in their work. These may be for major website redevelopments, selection of new technology platforms, or to gain further resources.
Considerable amounts of work go into creating a business case, but success is far from certain. Too often, business cases fail to hit the mark, even when they follow the guidelines provided by the senior executive themselves.
In part, this is because these business cases fail to target the emotional elements, concentrating instead on details and evidence.
Boring business cases
Web and intranet teams are often provided with a corporate template to fill in when creating a business case. This covers elements such as:
- current situation
- research conducted
- detailed findings
- options for improvements
- recommendations
- indicative figures
These documents can easily grow to 30, 50 or 100 pages in length. Considerable detail is captured and communicated, but the danger is that we lose sight of the forest for the trees.
The first major problem with these business cases is that they are boring. Few in the organisation have sufficient enthusiasm to read 100 pages of detailed business case, and even the executive summary can fail to inspire.
