Business Cases
Our business case feature provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating and justifying project investments, ensuring that every decision is backed by detailed financial analysis and strategic alignment. With tools for cost and benefit forecasting, contract planning, and trend analysis, this feature empowers organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions that drive value and achieve long-term objectives.
Easily Adopt the Leading Standard!
Definitive Pro offers the leading, and most easy-to-use, business case standard in the industry. Our financial business case provides a time-phased cost vs. benefit analysis. The financial business case is tab-driven and includes the following configurable tabs:
| Tab | Description |
|---|---|
| Business Need | Provides the submitter with the capability to enter data and textual information describing the business need for the project. |
| Business Need Assessment | Provides scorecard(s) to support an initial strategic alignment assessment of the business need. |
| Solution Approach | Provides the capability for the delivery organization to describe the solution approach to the business need. |
| Resource Budgeting | Provides the capability to collect estimates from the resource teams required to deliver on the solution. |
| Resource Planning | Provides a time-phased resource management capability by enabling resources to load their capacity over time (by month) and to allocate their resources for each investment. The capacity and allocations enable the portfolio manager to review and analyze the data at the portfolio and enterprise level, identify resource conflicts and bottlenecks, and act to alleviate the resource contention. |
| Forecast | Provides the capability to enter a 5-year cost and benefit projection and to discount out-year cash flows. It automatically calculates total cost (pre-project, project, and post-project), total benefits (revenue, cost reduction and cost avoidance) by year for a 5-year planning horizon. Definitive Pro also has the capability to configure which cost pools are to be used in the business cases. Available include technology business management (TBM); capital projects, and custom. |
| Results | Provides auto-calculated financial metrics, such as Return $, ROI %, IRR%, payback period, and net present value (NPV), and depicts whether each metric meets the establish hurdle rate (optional). Also provides visual charts and graphs and a one-click business case report in PDF. Definitive Pro® also provides an investment dashboard to visualize the composition of selected investments and depicts a “pass/fail” indicator of each investment versus established hurdle rates. |
| Location | Provides the capability to enter the location of the project and to plot the location on a map. This Geographic Information System (GIS) feature can be used to plot the location of multiple projects. |
| Contracts | Provides the capability to establish the acquisition approach for contract action required, and to assign contract budget $ to contracts. |
| Governance | Provides the capability to assign key roles, set key milestones, manage change requests, and track project health and status. |
| Documents | Provides a repository for reference documents associated with the business need and project. |
| Lookbacks | Provides the capability to track and analyze changes to the business case over time. |
What is a Business Case?
A business case is used to: manage purposeful business change by organizing the financial impacts in relationship to time to support decision-making regarding potential investments. An effective business case will use a proven methodology – a key to establishing credibility. It will also ensure that the underlying methodology is clear to the evaluators.
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