Staff at Kent

Building a business case: Best practice

Need help building a business case for your project? A new business case template may be the answer.

A well-thought out business case document will help get you approval for your projects to go ahead and ensure you receive resources  to complete them successfully.

In formal projects, a business case is one of the key documents that senior managers review when deciding whether to give a project the funding it needs to go ahead. In the business case, you detail the benefits that the project will deliver, how they’ll be achieved, what it will cost, and how long it will take.

To help you develop your business case in a consistent way, a Business Case Template has been created as an integral part of the Kent Project Management Framework (KPMF).

This document will help you:

  • Provide justification for your investment to enable senior management decision making
  • Adequately capture the background, business need, scope, investment, risk, dependencies, and anticipated benefits so that the project/investment can be approved, funded and prioritised.
  • Introduce a review mechanism at certain points in the process to ensure work is proceeding as planned and decide whether it should continue

The template is simple to use, includes clear “how to” guidance prompts and has been tried-and-test on a number of major Kent projects. Additional online help is also provided in the form of a Business Case LinkedIn Learning pathway.

For further information about Projects, contact the BIPU team: BIPU@kent.ac.uk