Accounting for...approval?

I’ve been asked by the team at Y Lab to put together a short post on the couple of days I spent in Wales working with colleagues to help them understand how to compile a business case for their innovation projects.

The primary focus of a business case is often misunderstood, yes it must represent the financial realities of the status-quo and project those against the financial realities of a redesigned service or process, but for a business case to really be successful, it must achieve one thing: approval.

That means the primary focus of the business case is for those bidding for funding to be confident in their numbers and to be able to represent their proposed position accurately and effectively.

So, while we covered some of the intricacies of how you build a costing for staff time, and how you estimate for inflation, we also made sure that attendees were collecting their thoughts in the right way, so that they could correctly express the future change that they want to bring to their organisations.

For a business case to really be successful, it must achieve one thing: approval

To do this we used the Business Model Canvas, a free resource developed by Strategyzer, so that attendees could build a complete picture of all the elements that will go into delivering their proposed change.

Once this was done, attendees were able to work on the financials, projecting the changes that they wanted to see and plotting a cost analysis for those changes.

Colleagues on the course quickly adapted the tools to their proposed projects and we able to see some clear indications of the savings that could be made from improved services.

Exploring a wide range of services from transport to health screening, hospital admissions and social care, attendees built and then presented some of their work to the group, learning to argue the case for their project.

It was a privilege to be involved in two demanding, but highly rewarding workshops and I wish all of the attendees luck in the future applications to the Innovation fund. 

The Excel business case template shared during the workshop is available here.

More about the workshop and Innovate to Save

Innovate to Save has been set up to support new ideas that have the potential to generate cashable savings for Welsh public services and improve the quality of service delivery. The programme places as much emphasis on providing the right support and tools to develop robust project proposals as it does the funds to allow organisations to achieve change. During phase 1 of the programme, the support on offer takes the form of a series of workshops that have been designed to support different parts of the application form to participate in the R&D phase of Innovate to Save. More information about the programme is available here.

If you’d like to find out more about the workshops or the Innovate to Save programme, please get in touch:

Angharad: [email protected] / 029 2251 0320

Author

Ian Makgill

Ian is the founder of www.spendnetwork.com and www.openopps.com, open data websites that help businesses and government get a better understanding of procurement.