How to Review your Project PRINCE2 Business Case – Part 2
Owning the PRINCE2 Business Case
The Executive of the Project Board must own the Business Case and not delegate this to the project manager. The Executive represents the business viewpoint for the project and is responsible for ensuring the project delivers value for money.
The Senior User role specifies what benefits they can deliver from the project, and must then deliver them, so they too have an important input into the Business Case.
In line with the role of the Project Board as a whole, the Senior User and Executive roles must realize that they own overall project responsibility. This obviously includes the Business Case even though the project manager may do a lot of the work for them.
The Project Manager can play a lead role here – by emphasising the different types of benefits that the users may be seeking:
Aligning your PRINCE2 Business Case with corporate requirements
Most organizations have internal procedures in place for applying for funding, and have documents and procedures Laying out how you must prepare for that.
Do not make work for yourself by producing a Business Case according to the PRINCE2 List of contents, only to have to do the work over again to reformat it and adjust the information to meet your organizations need for financial submissions.
It’ll be far easier to agree a format that serves both purposes in the first place!
If the PRINCE2 Business Case includes elements that are useful to the project, but are not necessary for corporate application, put these elements in a separate section and do not submit that section as part of the corporate procedure.
Remember that one of the founding principles of PRINCE2, is that it should be tailored to suit the project and its environment.
Don’t be sucked into detail
Many organizations are asked for huge financial detail assumes anyone even suggests a potential project. Try not to get sucked into this and end up doing a full Business Case during the PRINCE2 starting up a project process.
Startup is supposed to go fast and the Business Case at that point is just a ballpark outline.
If you give in to Organizational pressure to produce detailed costings at that early point, you end up doing initiation in startup and it all takes far too long.
Instead, try to explain the PRINCE2 approach to your finance people and get them to see that you are not ignoring the detailed financial work, but that you are doing it as part of the planning when all the necessary detail from the project is available.
Updating your PRINCE2 Business Case during stages
PRINCE2 focuses on updating the Business Case at the end of each stage – but do not simply do that and forget all about the Business Case during each stage.
During your regular reviews of the stage to check the progress, you need to check the benefit projections from time to time as well.
If new information comes to light as part of the stage work that affects the benefit levels, it may have a knock-on effect on the viability of the whole project and you may need to warm the Project Board.
The Project Board may require a warning on benefits projection and set the tolerance level for benefits.
So, if the projections go outside the band they have specified, the project manager must warn the Project Board immediately that the stage is in ‘benefits exception ‘
Using your PRINCE2 Business Case when managing issues
When dealing with a project issue, or anything that anyone brings to the project manages attention, such as a problem or an opportunity, do not forget to look at any implications for the Business Case or benefits projections.
As an example, if the project is to give advanced information of its product launch at an exhibition, and the prerelease brochures have just come back from the printers with poor quality images, this single fact may hurt sales figures (benefits) after the project has completed.
The PRINCE2 method urges you to consult Business Assurance to help check out the side of the issue impact analysis.
As a final point here, it is vital that everyone involved with the project needs to have the Business Case continually front of mind – not just the Project Board – and not least the project manager!
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