Change comes with challenges, and many organizations struggle to implement new ways of working. Lasting, positive transformations demand a systematic approach, and building a strong business case is the first step, whether you are implementing new technology or updating workflows. Creating a compelling case often means expanding your understanding of how people and processes deliver value to an organization. Building buy-in requires communicating from a position of empathy. The work is worth it, and successful digital transformations improve facilities and assets, drive investment returns, and enhance employee engagement.
Welcome to the first Eptura Insights post, a new series from Eptura’s worktech consultancy, where we help enterprises manage change at every step of worktech implementations.
How to build a successful business case
A standard business case is a structured proposal for a project that outlines the benefits, costs, and risks. A strong business case delivers clear answers to critical questions for large, transformational projects. And it’s just as important at the final stages of a project as it is before the project even begins.
At the start, it serves as a decision-making tool, providing a clear and concise overview of the reasons an organization should undertake a project. Building a business case gives a company the answer to the fundamental macro-level question: Will the eventual returns justify the initial and ongoing investments of time, energy, and focus? Projects pull employees away from regular tasks and require funding, often initial and ongoing. A business case must successfully argue that all that extra effort and refocused resources are worth it.
Throughout the life of the project, the business case also serves as a reference point to maintain focus and accountability, especially in large, multi-year transformational projects where distractions and changing priorities are common.
Include many types of value when exploring potential benefits
Before answering the critical question “Should we do this?”, it’s important for companies to understand that projects can deliver many types of value. Often the easiest to find and quantify are financial. A company looking to maximize its investments in corporate real estate, for example, can calculate how much it can save by reducing operations and maintenance expenses with intelligent worktech. It can also calculate the cost savings from mitigating security risks with a modern visitor management solution. In both cases, the connections between actions and savings are direct. The company can see a clear path with concrete steps to cut costs and mitigate the risk of expensive issues.
There are also qualitative benefits, which are harder to calculate because the cause-and-effect relationship might be less clear or take more time. So, a project might improve the employee experience, leading to stronger job satisfaction and better retention. Because hiring and training new employees is expensive, keeping existing employees happy helps companies save money.
There’s also a lot of value in projects that help set employees up for more meaningful, more fulfilling work. In our experience working with organizations to optimize their workplace and asset operations, we see employees who are currently delivering value, but it’s the wrong kind based on their position in the company. If the department relies on a lot of manual data capture, for example, there could be someone at the director level doing basic analytics instead of data-driven strategic thinking. With the right initiatives, they could be delivering more value to the company while enjoying a higher level of job satisfaction.
Marry internal and external data to larger goals
A comprehensive business case contains careful combinations of data, each with a separate role. It helps you capture the current circumstances, shows you what’s possible, and validates initiatives.
Internal numbers can include:
- Salaries
- Headcounts
- Real estate costs
- Asset costs
But you can also add metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), like the average cost of a work order or the monthly budget for parts and materials.
Making raw data tell a story is an art and a science, but asking someone about their day-to-day pain points is a direct and powerful way to understand their current challenges. Make sure to speak with employees from across departments and up and down the organizational chart. Only the space planner knows how much time and effort it’s taking them to maintain a multi-office seating chart on spreadsheets, while the head of procurement can describe the pressure of creating budgets without reliable data on asset and equipment life spans.
Collaborative input from both employees and executives is important because it helps identify the key metrics and objectives that are important to the organization, and ensures the business case represents reality and aligns with the organization’s overall goals.
Involving different levels of the organization in the creation of the business case also helps in securing buy-in and alignment, making it more likely that the initiative will be successful.
How to build project buy-in
Buy-in building includes understanding each stakeholder’s job responsibilities and performance metrics, securing a strong executive sponsor, and implementing a change management work stream that helps maintain focus and momentum.
Show the connections between larger initiatives and personal metrics
It’s easy to get people excited about a project when you can show them exactly how it’s going to help them improve their job performance metrics. You need to “speak someone’s language” to get them to hear what you’re saying.
- Chief Financial Officer (CFO): Reducing costs, such as the cost of unallocated or unoccupied space and efficiency and effectiveness of operations
- Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO): Improving the workplace environment and employee satisfaction
- Chief Executive Officer (CEO) (especially in financial services): Updating and enhancing the workplace to meet modern standards and expectations
You can’t always guess what’s important to people based solely on their title. Your metrics are important, but so are your boss’s. We’ve found, for example, that the focus changes for corporate real estate teams depending on where they sit within the org chart. When they report to a chief operating officer or CFO, they’re concerned about unallocated space or unoccupied space. For teams that report to a CHRO, the priority shifts to employee experience. With the first group, you can build buy-in for implementing new technology by showing how it can help them maximize utilization rates. For the second group, you highlight the ways you can make it easier for employees to come to the office to connect and collaborate with coworkers.
Another important insight into metrics is how many people focus only on a few of them, even when there are many that could directly connect to their job. Part of our work building business cases and buy-in involves helping people understand all the metrics they could be tracking. Once they understand that there are more areas of opportunity for them, they’re more invested in the project. We often start by asking people, “What are you reporting on day to day, and why?” From there, we review a menu of possible KPIs for them to consider.
Strategically build support throughout the org chart
You don’t have to win everyone over, but there are specific people who will be critical. To be successful, the initiatives in the business case need active, ongoing support from people in the organization who can deliver influence and oversight. There’s a difference between a mid-level director supporting a project and the CEO keeping an eye on progress. You’ll need both along the way, but the CEO’s attention simply carries more weight. The CEO can ensure departments dedicate the necessary time and resources to the project. They’re also in the best position to help you tie all the initiatives to larger goals.
That mid-level director, though, is also important. Their knowledge of day-to-day operations of invaluable to any project. They’re the ones who can tell you what’s possible and how to fine-tune initiatives to accommodate current realities. Their competency creates respect from and influence with their coworkers and reports, so they’re the ones who can get departments to embrace projects.
A common misstep when building buy-in is limiting efforts to the departments directly affected by a project. Organizations always have a lot of cross-functionality. Departments don’t operate in vacuums. When deciding where to build buy-in, you need to look at every affected workflow and process end to end. Even small changes can affect a large group of people.
Another challenge is opt-outs. Just as important as getting people invested in initiatives is not letting parts of the company remove themselves from projects. We’ve seen large IT consolidation projects at global companies devolve into much smaller local upgrades once one region learned it didn’t have to participate.
The growing operatives for building business cases and buy-in
The good news for building business cases and buy-in is that new ways of understanding the role of real estate are making things easier. In the past, many organizations treated their facilities like a utility. It was just there, considered part of the overall cost of doing business. But with the growing focus on budgets across industries and a new appreciation for the ways spaces and assets directly support the bottom line, organizations are looking for ways to better support employee productivity while cutting operational costs.
Authors
By Sarah Kilmartin, Erik Zink
Sarah Kilmartin, Director of Customer Insights, has more than two decades of experience managing enterprise customers and supporting global departments through workplace transformations. As a former facility and operations leader for a leading flex space provider, she’s an expert on workplace strategy, qualitative and quantitative thought leadership, and customer insight.
