Reflection on “Getting the Green Light by Michelle Bowles, July 2012”
This article is discussing one of the documents of the pre-initiating phase of the project and in this phase the project managers lay the groundwork for a project before the project officially starts. The most important document that is generated in this phase is the business case, which is a document that provides the financial justification for investing in a particular project. After presenting the business case to the executives/sponsors, the project manager should get an approval or rejection to the project, and that is why developing a business case for the project could be the fast track to the board to buy-in, and that makes building a clear business a top priority, especially that nowadays in this marketplace many firms also have little to spend.
This article suggests a few points to keep in maid when building a business case, in order to come up with an effective one. First, the project manager should focus on the hard numbers in the business case because executives are very busy people, and most of the time they are not interested in the details, and so the project manager should demonstrate the value of an initiative in terms of profit, savings, market share, etc. Second, the project manager should highlight how this project benefits the origination taking into consideration the strategic objectives of the firm, and that requires a full understanding of the firm’s vision, goals and objectives, and how the project outcomes will satisfy the diverse stakeholder. One of the issues that I noticed, many firms out there have no clear vision or mission, they came into the business to generate more money, but that is still considered to be very general, and needs to be more specific, and that is why many projects fail to be aligned with a vision that is not clear from the very start, and that also gives the external stakeholders a very bad impression about the company.
Finally, the project manager should understand the audience, and try to use that in building his business case, and adjust the business case to fit that board of directors or executives to gain their approval. The article suggested that there will always be one measures (time, cost and scope), that the executive might focus on, and that is why the project manager should focus on that measure. They also suggest knowing what problems the other projects faced and try to explain how the project manager will avoid it in this project.
Some of the lessons that I learned from this article; it is very helpful to keep a continuous path from the project manager to the business side in order to enhance business knowledge, because that will help in achieving projects that are in the best interest of the firm, and it will also help to better understand the executives and win their trust and support for the project. I also learned that the project manager should not be afraid to ask for help, and he/she should always offer alternatives, while keep making sure of using a very simple terminology because in many cases, executives don’t understand project management language.
Personally, and because of the nature of my job as a civil group leader working in the construction industry, the projects are usually assigned to me and my group, so we never had to come up with a business case; however, the closest thing to that that I had to go through once is asking my manager to approve an advanced course in structural design for the rest of the group, and I was asked to make a gap analysis to evaluate the current situation and desired one, and how would that be reflected on the group work, so I had to go through that, especially to get the support of the HR department as well. I never thought of that course as independent project, but now after reading this, I think it was, and what I did was very close to the idea of the business case document.
