A good business case is so much more than simply the means to justify a decision. A well-written and well-researched business case will secure funding; make sure any project stays on the right side of regulation; mobilize support for the cause; provide the platform for managing the project and the benchmark against which to measure progress. Ian Gambles' Making the Business Case shows you how to make sense of the task at hand, develop a strategy, articulate your options, define the benefits, establish the costs, identify the risks and make a compelling case. Just as with the best business cases, the text is concise, jargon-free and easy to read; illustrated throughout with practical examples drawn from real cases and including reflective exercises at the end of each chapter to help you consolidate what you have learned. At only 198 pages long, this is a jewel of a book; essential reading for the manager tasked with making the business case, the senior manager who needs to understand and test it, and the project manager who is responsible for delivering whatever is agreed on.

"Just the understanding and insights you will pick up about how people encounter and cope with combinations of technical, social, political, and economic opportunities and challenges make the book a joy to read and worth much more than the price of it alone." --Barry Boehm, from the Foreword This practical handbook shows you how to build an effective business case when you need to justify--and persuade management to accept--software change or improvement. Based on real-world scenarios, the book covers the most common situations in which business case analyses are required and explains specific techniques that have proved successful in practice. Drawing on years of experience in winning the "battle of the budget," the author shows you how to use commonly accepted engineering economic arguments to make your numbers "sing" to management. The book provides examples of successful business cases; along the way, tables, tools, facts, figures, and metrics guide you through the entire analytic process. Writing in a concise and witty style, the author makes this valuable guidance accessible to every software engineer, manager, and IT professional. Highlights include: How and where business case analyses fit into the software and IT life cycle process Explanations of the most common tools for business case analysis, such as present-value, return-on-investment, break-even, and cost/benefit calculation Tying the business process to the software development life cycle Packaging the business case for management consumption Frameworks and guidelines for justifying IT productivity, quality, and delivery cycle improvement strategies Case studies for applying appropriate decision situations to software process improvement Strategic guidelines for various business case analyses With this book in hand, you will find the facts, examples, hard data, and case studies needed for preparing your own winning business cases in today's complex software environment.

How do you decide on the best course of action for your company to take advantage of new opportunities? By building a business case. This book provides a framework for building a business case. You'll learn how to: Clearly define the opportunity you'll want to address in your business case Identify and analyze a range of alternatives Recommend one option and assess its risks Create a high-level implementation plan for your proposed alternative Communicate your case to key stakeholders

"You've got a great idea that will increase revenue or productivity--but how do you get approval to make it happen? By building a business case that clearly shows its value. Maybe you struggle to win support for projects because you're not sure what kind of data your stakeholders will trust, or naysayers always seem to shoot your ideas down at the last minute. Or perhaps you're intimidated by analysis and number crunching, so you just take a stab at estimating costs and benefits, with little confidence in your accuracy. To get any idea off the ground at your company you'll have to make a strong case for it. This guide gives you the tools to do that"--

Providing the necessary background information and hands-on tools to build compelling business cases, this book will increase the reader's capability to champion new business development ideas, take them to senior management, and facilitate the decision process by understanding the key theories and practices of finance and corporate investments.

This book contains the extended and revised versions of selected papers from the Third International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2013), held in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, during July 8-10, 2013. The symposium was organized and sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Institute for Collaboration and Research on Enterprise Systems and Technology (IICREST), in cooperation with the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS), the Center for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), and AMAKOTA Ltd. The theme of BMSD 2013 was "Enterprise Engineering and Software Generation." The 13 full and 20 short papers presented at BMSD 2013 were selected from 56 submissions. The eight papers published in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from the 13 full papers. The selection includes papers touching upon a large number of research topics, ranging from more conceptual ones, such as modeling landscapes, process modeling, declarative business rules, and normalized systems to more practical ones, such as business-case development and performance indicators, and from more business-related topics, such as value modeling and service systems, to topics related to information architectures.

Design: A Business Case challenges you to stimulate innovation in your own organization as an ongoing and integral dialogue between complementary skills–to bridge mind and matter, image and identity. Design thinking is a framework developed to ensure C-suite endorsement of the pursuit of design excellence in all actions undertaken by the organization. Design management is a rigorous and strategically anchored mechanism to capitalize on the investment in design as intellectual capital. And design – as we’ve always known it – is the skills, methods and creative capabilities needed to embody ideas and direction. Design thinking inspires, design management enables, design embodies. This book aims to build the bridges needed to reconcile the three, and to encourage organizational and professional environments in which their combined forces can thrive and reverberate.

Becoming a partner in a professional services firm is for many ambitious fee-earners the ultimate goal. But in this challenging industry, with long hours, high pressure and even higher expectations, how do you stand out from the crowd? How do you build the most effective relationships? And how do you find the time to do all of this and still have a fulfilling personal life? Now in its third edition, How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life equips individuals at the start of their career through to partner with the skills needed to reach and succeed at the leadership level. How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life details the expectations and realities of being a partner and outlines how you can continue to achieve once you have obtained the much-coveted role. This edition is updated with guidance on developing the right mindset for success and the importance of mentoring and sponsorship. There is a specific focus on women and BAME professionals and the challenges faced by individuals coming from non-traditional or under-represented backgrounds. Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie provide a guide to help you tackle common obstacles and work smarter - not harder - to reach the top. Start your journey to partnership and still have the time for a life outside of work.

Love it? Hate it? Or, just don’t care? How we feel about something dramatically affects how we interact with it. When we feel, we care. When we care, things happen. Companies that are thriving, not just surviving, are much more than a set of ruthlessly efficient and mechanistic processes – they are a social system operated by people for people. The quality of relationships, both inside and outside the organization is a far more important driver of sustainable success or failure than the quality of its control systems. The head is important, but it is the heart that matters most. If you want your customers to be brand ambassadors and your employees to brag about you to their friends, you need them to not just think you’re great – you need them to feel you’re great. You need them to love you – and for that, you need them to feel that you love them. For over a decade Marc Cox has been helping companies whose toxic cultures, miserable employees, and angry customers have all but destroyed them to rebuild their company spirit, discover the business case for love and build an organization that is wonderful to work for, brilliant to do business with and has the mindset of creating memorable employee and customer experiences. Underpinned by fresh insights and perspectives, robustly tested and refined by the real world experience of working with a wide range of companies and over 2,000 senior executives drawn from all parts of the world, and filled with fascinating and illustrative “love stories” the book will help you to make the business case for love. It will help you to find a more rewarding and invigorating way of working – both emotionally and financially. In short, it shows what happens when the love is put back into business.

A brief but complete outline of what belongs in a business case and why it belongs. It assumes no prior background in finance or business planning. The focus is on questions like these: How do I prove that one choice is the best business decision? How do I show that all important costs and benefits are included? How do I show that alternative action proposals are compared fairly? How do I establish value for benefits--even non financial benefits? How do I build a business case when I am in a government or non profit organization? How do I minimize risk and show management how to maximize business results?