Long-running teams and Business Cases, can they be friends?

Published on 12 January 2024 at 13:30

How can we be better at tracking, measuring and sharing (without shame) benefits realisation (ROI) on the things we worked on?

 

Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) & Operational Expenditure (OPEX)

 

 

Long-running teams are protected or shielded from the costs of work that comes their way. This prevented the teams from fully understanding the problems to solve (i.e. scope) of the work needed to deliver value. TRANSPARENCY is one of the most valuable aspects of empowering teams.

 

Who’s to say they don't need to know these details?

I had the pleasure of being part of teams that were exposed to the costs of running teams and delivering outcomes. When team members are aware of all constraints (yes, costs are constraints) and the expected business outcomes, including how we track, and measure ROI and what benefits realisations were shared with stakeholders, the team members come up with the most pragmatic and creative ways to deliver outcomes that align to business expectations.

 

Those teams that weren’t aware of all the constraints (i.e. financial implications), tend to elaborate and come up with a perfect solution that doesn’t warrant or support the cost-benefit of the problem to solve or value proportion. These teams are also more focused on the agile delivery process and methodology than focusing on the right problems to solve or value to deliver.

 

Of course, there’s that fine balance of when we should bring teams into estimating costs before we even create a business case or present it to stakeholders. And this balance is where we haven't gotten right in this industry.

 

I've tried these and it worked for me. So, it's worth sharing for you to experiment in your space:

Step 1. Identify the strategic goals we're working towards

Step 2. Create a draft business case that includes:

  • Identifying the high-level problems to solve that align with the strategic goals
  • Consulting with key team players that has been earmarked to work on this

Step 3. Clarity on what the expected outcomes are

Step 4. Define how we might measure the success of this outcome

Step 5. Share & consult this high-level information to delivery teams (or key representatives) to get an order of magnitude (OOM) with a confidence level (+/- 30%, 50% or 70%)

  • These confidence levels are driven by the assumptions identified and made when estimating

Step 6. Refine the business case with OOM input to calculate the ROI / Benefits realisation

Step 7. Share this with stakeholders for alignment, endorsement and prioritisation

  • Yes! Prioritisation against all the other must-do, priority 1, most important things for the same teams to work on

Step 8. Refine the business case again once we have prioritisation aligned with all stakeholders, i.e. identify and clarify the trade-off outcomes

Step 9. Share this with the team members working on delivering the value - this forms the scope the teams need to elaborate, estimate and work within.

Step 10. Where appropriate, should the estimated outcome from elaboration falls outside the OOM confidence level, then the business case is to be re-refined and re-shared with stakeholders. 

  • Super important - this generally gets missed or ignored because the admin process for this is arduous. Sometimes it is dependent on the program/project/delivery manager on this, they may not want to be seen as incompetent by changing the state of the submitted business case. You know, ego.

Step 11. Track delivery progress against these pivotal points:

  • Delivery time estimates - i.e. 2 levels: (A) OOM estimates and (B) detailed estimates after team members’ elaboration
  • Delivery cost estimates - i.e. against the OOM (+/- 30%, 50% or 70%) in business case
  • Strategic Goals performance (metrics) - I.e. % of impact this Value proposition moves
  • Value proposition performance (metrics) - I.e. $ and/or #
  • ROI / Benefits Realisation (metrics) - I.e. performance ($ and/or #) across time —- this is to be shared at a regular cadence to all stakeholders and the teams that worked on delivering the value.

NO! These DO NOT NEED to take 3 months!

The above activities, though may seem over the top, are purely what we call doing our due diligence - I'm seeing less and less of these days. And why is that? 'Cos everything is urgent! Everything needs to be done now! But at what cost?.... and we're back to square one (sigh!).

So, how can we do this EFFICIENTLY and relatively QUICKLY?

Here's an attempt to describe what I did visually (cos you know, too much text hurts my eyes & eventually the brain):

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