Organizations and companies often take on new projects or create new business ventures. This is quite a regular task for executives and partners but it’s not done quickly. When an organization wants to start a new project, they need to prepare several documents to present how the project is going to be beneficial for the organization along with the features it will have and the resources it will require to complete. By looking at these and many other elements, stakeholders can decide if the project will be profitable or not. The document includes all of these elements about a project or new business in the business case. These days, it’s very often to see a business case in day to day-to-day lives of employees directors, and partners. This way it makes more sense to use a readymade template rather than creating the entire document from scratch every time there is a new project.
Guidelines for preparing a Business Case with these Templates:
- Add an Executive Summary:
An executive summary serves the same purpose in a business case as a cover letter in a job application. When you apply for a job, you add your contact details, experience, achievements education, and skills but it can take a lot of space on the application. To make it easy and quick to understand for employers, you add a cover letter that summarizes the entire application. While writing a business case, the executive summary plays the same role. In most cases, stakeholders and potential investors won’t have time to go through the entire business case in the first meeting. They will only read the executive summary. Keep in mind that it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to read the entire summary and the general rule is to keep it to just one page.
Free Business Case Templates
Here are 20 Free Business Case Templates in MS Word Format to help you prepare your own Business Case quickly.
- The core purpose of the Project or Business Venture:
When you decide to start a new business and you are looking for investors, it’s possible that the same business already exists in the market. These days the competition among organizations and manufacturers is so high that potential investors look for unique ideas and extraordinary concepts. This means you need to add a particular section on the business case that only describes why you want to start the business and how it’s going to be different than the competition. You can either talk about addressing a problem from a whole new perspective or you can explain how you can bring innovation to an existing product or service.
- Provide Alternatives:
When stakeholders and investors go through business cases, the one thing that they don’t find quite often is alternate plans or options to execute a project or a different approach to a business. Yes, you indeed had an idea and you want to build an entire business or product line around it but the stakeholders might not be able to see the potential in the business from your perspective. To explain why this idea will work, you need to give some alternatives or options as well. This will show that you at least looked at solving a problem from different perspectives and then you selected this option.
- Project alignment with Organizational Goals:
In case you are adding a project to an existing business, it’s really important to discuss how this project is going to match the overall goals and objectives of the organization. In this section, you can also talk about how the project is going to bring improvements to the existing business and how it will enhance the primary objectives.
- Timeline and Costs:
The key purpose of a business case document is to find new investors and stakeholders which means when they take a look at this document, they would want to see how much time it will take to complete and how much it’s going to cost. Keep in mind that you should include an actual timeline and exact expenses to execute the project because adding false figures might get you the investors but it’s going to create serious problems for you in the future.
Kamran Khan is a seasoned blogger with a deep-seated passion for office document processes and the art of productivity. With a wealth of experience spanning over a decade, Kamran has become a trusted name in the blogging community, known for his insightful articles and practical solutions that help individuals and businesses streamline their daily operations.
