At a recent conference I ran a workshop about building business cases for web 2.0 and one of the feedback responses was that the person was disappointed that all I talked about was 'generic business case' stuff.
The funny thing is that I see so many business cases for web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 projects that fail to gain traction or ultimately fail to deliver business benefits precisely due to a failure to prepare a good business case.
The important thing to understand is that the nature of the technology proposed is almost irrelevant, more relevant are the following:
If you are unable to put together the story of why the proposed technology will improve the business somehow then that is a red flag. It's a sign to go back to the drawing board and keep working on the idea. Bad projects always start badly, the business case is often where the rot sets in. A good business case is a sound foundation for execution of a project.
There is lots of good advice out there on how do deliver successful projects, and some exposition of project failures. Check out some of the links below...
IT Project Failures
Gantthead
Australian Institute of Project Management
Project Management Institute
ProjectManagement.com
By Carruthers via Aide-mémoire
Link to original post
The funny thing is that I see so many business cases for web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 projects that fail to gain traction or ultimately fail to deliver business benefits precisely due to a failure to prepare a good business case.
The important thing to understand is that the nature of the technology proposed is almost irrelevant, more relevant are the following:
- how the technology supports the overall business strategy - you have no business proposing it if it does not support or extend the business strategy
- what the story or narrative is that makes sense of the proposed technology for the business - any new technology adoption is a change program and needs to be driven as such
- how to bring all the various parts of the business together to gain benefit from the new technology - stakeholder engagement and management
- how the new technology will drive changes in operational areas of the business - how business processes, staffing, other resources will need to adapt to deliver and support the new technology
- the current internal capability to deliver the technology - this is at both technical and business operations levels, also often people don't want to call in experts
If you are unable to put together the story of why the proposed technology will improve the business somehow then that is a red flag. It's a sign to go back to the drawing board and keep working on the idea. Bad projects always start badly, the business case is often where the rot sets in. A good business case is a sound foundation for execution of a project.
There is lots of good advice out there on how do deliver successful projects, and some exposition of project failures. Check out some of the links below...
IT Project Failures
Gantthead
Australian Institute of Project Management
Project Management Institute
ProjectManagement.com
By Carruthers via Aide-mémoire
Link to original post
