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Need to Convince Management? How to Build a Business Case

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.

  1. How to identify the real economic buyer
  2. Summarize the current situation and how much it costs to work this way now
  3. Explain the outcomes your change(s) will deliver.
  4. Specify the expected value, in terms of tangible, intangible, and peripheral benefits
  5. Create three options for buyer to consider
  6. If necessary, write a brief summary.

Johanna Rothman

About 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 About Johanna »

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