The project business case also has the benefits management plan within that, so that we know what benefits we’re delivering. All these documents will feed into our project charter which ultimately is one of the first steps, or is the first step in initiating a project. From there the project charter will feed in with all of the information that we’ve gathered from our needs assessment, business case, the risks involved, the stakeholders as an early view of the stakeholders, and risks and scope and schedule that might be involved and all of that feeds into the project management plan on a larger scale where we’re using that now to manage our project on a daily basis.

Project Business Case

So let’s dive into the project business case. What is actually in it? There are a few things usually, and they include business needs – so a description of what is prompting the need for action. Maybe customers have fallen off over the last year and we’re wanting to get more customers, maybe there’s a lot of rework that’s happening in a certain area and we’re wanting to reduce that rework. Whatever the business need is, we’re wanting to include that in the project business case. It’s a feasibility study of why we’re initiating the project. We usually give an analysis of the situation, so what are the facts, what is currently happening, are we currently at 80% capacity but we need to be at a hundred percent capacity? Whatever it is put the raw data and that project management data and info into this analysis of the situation for your business case, and then based on that we’re wanting to give a recommendation.

What’s the need, what’s the current situation, and based on that what are we recommending that people do to make a change and deliver what we need to deliver for this project.

Lastly once we’ve done that of course we’re wanting to see how the benefits that we’re delivering will be measured. Will it be Bob over there in a certain department measuring this for the next two or three months to make sure that things are on track and that it’s actually delivering what we want to deliver? However we’re going to measure it we want to put that in the plan as well.

Which leads us into the project benefits management plan. How are we managing these benefits? We want to usually include what the target benefits are, is it increasing this or decreasing that, include it in the project benefits management plan. We want the time-frame for realizing those benefits – is it a year? Is it six months? Is it one month?

Next, who owns the benefits. This comes back to our BAU, our operations. What are the metrics that we’re measuring, what are the assumptions that we’re making when we’re here measuring these things? We just need to know what those assumptions are in case they end up being wrong, and then we can see why we didn’t meet the the target or maybe we did better than the target (or whatever it is).

Ultimately we want to see what risks there are to meeting those benefits as well and put those in the project benefits management plan.

There are many different ways to measure these things and measure these benefits and some of these are called out in the project management body of knowledge. They are Net Present Value – you will need to know this for the exam usually they’re fairly straightforward to go into and often the way they’ll word it on the exam will be “you have a net present value of of this and a net present value of that, so which one should you actually choose?” And you choose the highest.

For your Return On Investment we just want the highest return on investment. Internal Rate of Return – we want the higher rate of return as well. The payback period we want a shorter payback period if possible, and the benefit to cost ratio we usually want a higher benefit to a lower cost if possible.

But all of those are just numbers and numerical objectives and financial objectives – usually we can also have things like meeting non-financial objectives, fulfilling contract terms or conditions, meeting governance or regulatory requirements, achieving stakeholder satisfaction, meeting organizational strategy or goals – all these things could be non-monetary benefits that we’re realizing at the end of the project and we can also include.

And those are the project management business documents as part of our foundational elements of project management.