The Business Case Is Dead. Long Live the Opportunity Canvas.

Speaker A: Business case is dead. Long live the Opportunity Canvas. I know every PMO lead and traditional project manager just felt a disturbance in the force, but here's the truth. Business cases, as most organizations use them, are relics, outdated, slow, political and in my experience, usually written to justify a decision someone has already made. The Better Business Analysis Institute presents the Better Business Analysis podcast with Benjamin Walsh. Welcome back to the Better Business Analysis podcast with your host, Benjamin Walsh. And thanks for joining me today as we talk about the Opportunity Canvas. That's right, we give a breakdown why the traditional business case is broken, why modern companies like think, uh, Amazon, Cilian, Spotify, even some New Zealand based tech companies are using it. Uh, what is the Opportunity Canvas? Why is it taking over the business case? How BAs, PMs and execs can adopt it without blowing up governance, which is of course the main concern. And I'll give you some practical examples about how you can apply it straight away. Let's get into it. So why are traditional business cases relics? I'm in the middle of one, a much smaller one than I did six months ago, which was a government one, and this one's much smaller. And I've tried different things, uh, in terms of one page business cases, which this, where this topic aligns with a little bit. Um, but let's, let's be honest with ourselves. Traditional business cases suffer from five fatal flaws. Number one is that they're written too early, usually before real analysis begins, before we've spoken to customers, before we know the actual problem. So we lock ourselves into a solution because that's the most of the costs, by the way, and what we're hanging our benefits on before we understand the true demand or need. Two, they pretend that we can predict return on investment with magic numbers. 10 year cost benefit models for a problem we barely understand. Everyone gets obsessed with the spreadsheet. This is fiction though, right? And CFO approved fiction, but fiction nonetheless. Number three is that they take months, not days. By the time the business case is approved, the market has moved, the technology has changed, all the assumptions you based it on and no longer true. Or you don't have those, um, political team members that you thought you had on board because they've changed priorities. Number four, they reward politics. Number not evidence. Whoever writes it better sells it harder wins. Not the opinion that creates the most value. Right, Sorry, I shouldn't say opinion, but the option that creates the most value and they assume certainty makes the executive feel great. Modern product development is uncertain by default. Business cases pretend that, um, uncertainty doesn't exist and therefore they just stack up risks. Right. But no one ever really goes back to rewrite it. It's really a 1990s artifact and we're trying to solve for maybe 2030. So what are modern companies using instead? Let's take a look at some organizations that have actually ditched the business case, right? Or heavily, uh, limited it and moved on. So Amazon starts with a press release, right? They do a press release and FAQ before any solution is approved. The future press release they call it doesn't actually go out to press. Clarifies the customer problem, what success will look like, why anyone would care, and the risks. It's short, sharp and customer driven. Uh, Cilian, they make um, Jira and Confluence. They have the Opportunity Canvas which I like the most. Their internal playbook uses the Opportunity Canvas to explore and they're still developing this in their product by the way. The business problem, the users, current behaviors, hypotheses. I uh, like that one. Value metrics and bit sizing. No business case required, just problem clarity which links completely to what BAs do and value hypothesis, which is kind of what BA should be doing. Spotify, they do bits and problem spaces. So Spotify doesn't fund projects, they bit, uh, they have betting rounds on prioritized problem spaces. Teams pitch the value of exploring a problem, not the guarantee of fixed return on investment capital. Uh, one replaced a 40 page uh, business case with a two page problem. Briefs and capital one are huge. They do lean opportunity assessments and they are involved in the startup world and Silicon Valley in a huge way. Uh, New Zealand companies like Air, New Zealand, Xero, Trade Me, Datacom, uh, they are using shorter, leaner, uh, evidence first. Anything over two to three pages is treated with suspicion and the tide has turned. However, those bottom examples are, what I'm used to is one page business cases. But as we move to the Silian example and we look at the Opportunity Canvas, it's slightly different. And Spotify is probably on the other end of the spectrum where they've got a product and it's internal, internally driven. Well, sorry, internally pitched because I've got one product, but definitely driven by customer insights. So let's explore the Opportunity Canvas. The Opportunity Canvas is a practic, practical, modern replacement for a 40 page business case. It's short, it's focused, it's grounded in customer problems, not internal opinions. And it includes the problem statement. Plain language, no jargon, no politics, straight out of the BA book. Problem statement, we've talked about it. Uh, listen to the podcast, go on the Course problem statement, customer segments. I love this stuff. I'm doing some work in there at the moment. Who actually has this problem of all your segments? Not everyone. Current behaviors. What do people do today instead of using the solution you're proposing? So current behaviors could be uh, viable alternatives or current alternatives, uh, in a kind of a lean canvas. What is the value and impact? So it's called impact and value. What good looks like if we fix it. So what is the impact and values? Do you have a matrix, uh, for that? Um, actually Silian has that now in their, in their customer discovery area. Risks and constraints. So uh, yes, we need to say where it might blow up. Success measures. So true outcome measures, not KPIs vanity. KPIs like true measures that actually matter. So NPS score would be one high level approach. Not a solution yet. But problems first and then solution later. So what are the five steps you gotta take? Cost and effort ranges. Not a forecast, just T shirt sizing and not fake precision. So small, medium, large T shirt sizing. And this is why companies adopt it. They take one to two hours to do it, not three months. They do it in a room. It works in agile or product LED environments. It actually works if you've got a governance waterfall governance on top as well. Uh, it forces teams to confront the problem, not just jump to solution. It should be driven by the business, not by the tech team. Easy for the execs to understand, uh, to digest. And that's so important. It reduces bias, it cuts waste and it enables faster decision cycles, which is what we want. It's the difference between approving a project and approving the exploration of a problem space. I'll say that again. You're not asking to approve a project, you're asking to approve the exploration of a problem space. And if you know my 4P plus model, you know about it, then we always start with our people, right? And then we talk about the processes. Now in those processes, data problems, they're the problem spaces. You're doing that before you go to the project. This fits nicely with that model and research. What does the industry say? So Gartner, McKinsey, uh, CBG, product related org studies, IABA surveys, they all point to the same conclusion. Traditional business cases are one of the top barriers to speed innovation and delivering value. 74% of approved business cases never deliver the forecasted ROI. So waste of time. Project funding cycles three times longer with a formal business case is required. Organizations using lean decision artifacts. So opportunity. Uh, in this example we would be using the opportunity Canvas, well, they're 60% more likely to deliver measurable value within six months. And executives trust problem led briefs more than return on investment led pitches. Right, so the research backs what we already know in practice or what you're gonna learn. Okay, so there's some great examples. Um, New Zealand, a large retailer has the warehouse group, have, have, have, have done that. Uh, they've moved away from a huge business case. Right. Uh, because they had a problem with a traditional business case and a 38 page business case. Right. And the business case assumed efficiency, lift, stable customer demand, no, um, change in staff turnover. And none of these were validated. So six months into the build, demand shifted, staffing costs rose, the roi, uh, model collapsed after solution wasn't needed anymore. And even though the business case was technically approved, the logic inside it was built on sand. And so that group, the warehouse group, actually, they've moved away from business casting because they know about it. Right? And there's an example of Infantech, for example, where, uh, in 90 minutes, you know, the top pain point wasn't what they thought it was. Uh, they identified some real data point, real data, had that in the room, and, you know, they were able to focus on exploring the real problems and finding out exactly where they should invest. So don't ask for a business case, ask for a problem canvas or an opportunity canvas. If someone comes to you with I need this feature, make them fill in a one page canvas. If, uh, the ROI model has no customer evidence, throw it out 100%. Um, you can also ask. So it's really hard with experimentation. You just don't ask for full funding. Say fund the first two weeks, not full year. Well, fund us for six months. It's a long time with, with stuff, resources, but you can do it in two weeks. To prove value, um, you need to make it visual. You know, executives need to understand the canvas. They will understand it. You need to use ranges, not, uh, false predictions. But don't make sure those ranges aren't ridiculous. It's just contingency ranges, um, and keep the canvas alive. It's a lot, it evolves. It's not a signed off document. Right. And you need to teach the organization the difference between predicting value, discovering value, and measuring value. Most companies skip the middle, middle step, which is discovering value and why they deliver the wrong thing. If your organization is still writing 30 page business cases, here's my challenge for you. Try the Opportunity canvas on your next edition of do in Parallel. If you like, use it to replace the first 90% of the work a business case pretends to do. You'll move faster, you'll get clarity earlier, and you'll deliver solutions customers actually care about. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week. Sa.