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Need to Convince Management? How to Build a Business Case
PRESENTED BY
Johanna Rothman
Speaker, Consultant, Author for managing product development
Regardless of your place in the organization, you often need to convince others to spend money or time on a necessary effort. Sometimes, those proposals succeed. But too often, they don’t—and the organization suffers.
Instead, you can learn the secrets of successful consulting proposals. Those secrets include:
- Focusing the proposal on the ideal decision-maker,
- Explaining the tangible, intangible, and peripheral benefits, and
- Offering three options for your management’s consideration.
Don’t waste your time trying to calculate an incalculable number, such as ROI. Instead, become an internal consultant to help convince your management to fund the tools, training, or work, you need to succeed.
- How to identify the real economic buyer
- Summarize the current situation and how much it costs to work this way now
- Explain the outcomes your change(s) will deliver.
- Specify the expected value, in terms of tangible, intangible, and peripheral benefits
- Create three options for buyer to consider
- If necessary, write a brief summary.
Johanna Rothman
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams learn to see simple and reasonable things that might work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.
With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:
- Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility
- Become a Successful Independent Consultant
- Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer
- Modern Management Made Easy series: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself; Practical Ways to Lead and Serve (Manage) Others; Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization
- Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
- From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
- Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
- Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
- Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
- Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
- Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her website, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.
More from Johanna
ALL SESSIONS ↗Expand Your Critical Thinking Toolbox: How to See Your System
Have you encountered particularly stubborn problems at work? You think you “fixed” or “solved” it, but the problem rears its ugly head again. Worse, maybe you have no idea how to solve it. That’s when you know you’re dealing with a complex adaptive system. Too often, those kinds of systems reinforce themselves to continue to get these results. The problem seems unfixable or unsolvable. However, you can add more critical thinking skills to your toolbox. Those skills can help you clarify the underlying issues and help you solve them.
Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers
Are you drowning in data, but it's not helping you decide what to do? Maybe you wonder how to make better decisions faster. Flow metrics are _your_ evidence of what occurs at every level in the organization. Even better, unlike relative estimation or any other predictive form of estimation, you can use flow metrics and Monte Carlo simulation for much better prediction. Learn how to start with flow metrics. Then take that learning to ask questions to create a more effective organization at all levels.
Four Years of Lessons Learned About Successful Distributed Agile Teams
Before the pandemic, “everyone” said, "Agile approaches don't work for distributed teams!" Then came the pandemic and everyone figured it out—more or less. However, now, many teams work in ways they call "hybrid." Those are the most challenging forms for any distributed team: the satellite team or the cluster team. When those teams assume that they can work as if they were all collocated, the teams tend to lose their agility. Instead, teams can use the eight principles for successful distributed agile teams and optimize for those principles, instead of location. The eight principles are: ● Establish acceptable hours of overlap. ● Create transparency at all levels. ● Create a culture of continuous improvement with experiments. ● Practice pervasive communication at all levels. ● Create a project rhythm. ● Assume good intention. ● Create a culture of resilience. ● Default to collaborative work. In this presentation, Johanna will address just four of the principles—the ones that focus on and enable collaboration—to help you create the best environment for your distributed agile team.
Two and a half days with the people writing the playbook.
Insightful sessions, inspiring ideas, and meeting your peers — the skills and methods that take your organization to the next level.