The Value Proposition is the core of the business case — its why you’re doing the project. It spells out the value to be delivered in desired business outcomes, benefits and (financial) value terms.

But it does more.

It also assesses the risks to the delivery of the value proposition, the factors critical to the success of the project.

It identifies the changes required, the approach to be taken and therefore the costs involved.

And this is all facilitated through three workshops with a team accountable for generating the value proposition for the project.

(The building of the business case — the full document — is covered in How to build a business case.)

This Guide helps you organize and run the Value Proposition Generation process. This process is usually run over about four weeks whereby you go from nothing to a fully developed and agreed value proposition together with a clear idea as to how it will be delivered.

Before you build your complete business case you can assess whether your project is worthwhile and achievable. If not, stop now.

(You can use this process by yourself without any workshops if you wish; but I find many hands make light work.)

The challenges with any business case and value proposition are to identify the benefits and then quantify the value. Most business cases miss 25% of the project’s value — missed before you even start! Quantifying the value is also a challenge in that the required data is often not readily available so you need to go hunting for it.

This is where the workshops help to get all of the benefits on the table and then find the required data.

This Guide is the overall process guide. It takes you through the process and provides you with the workshop slides for each workshop together with tips on how to run each.

The detailed ‘How to …” guides are available separately — How to define your desired business outcomes, How to identify your project’s benefits, How to quantify your financial benefits, etc.

But one thing this approach will do is maximize your project’s benefits.

Benefits

1. Provides the processes for maximizing your project’s benefits
2. Makes ‘hard to justify projects’ easy to justify
3. Builds ownership and commitment across the organization
4. Generates the most important part of the business case
5. Provides a basis for generating widespread understanding of the project and its measures of success
6. Brings the range of different value generation process steps into an easy to follow end-to-end process
7. Leaves the other approaches to business case value generation for dead!
   
   

Who should read?

1. Project team members given responsibility for generating a value proposition/business case
2. PMO managers to understand and oversee the generation of value propositions/business cases
   
   

Contents

1. Understanding the business case as a ‘contract’
2. Understanding the end-to-end value proposition generation process
3. How to select and assemble the Value Proposition Generation team
   
4. How to generate a Project “Terms of Reference”
   
5. How to plan a benefits identification workshop (1)
   
6. How to generate project understanding and goals and objectives
7. How to identify your project’s benefits
8. How to identify your project’s risks
9. How to process the first workshop’s outputs
10. How to plan the benefits realisation workshop (2)
11. How to agree the “Desired Business Outcomes”
12. How to identify the major change activities
13. How to identify the Critical Success Factors
14. How to identify the financials benefits’ sources of information
15. How to identify the financial costs
16. How to process workshop two’s outputs
17. How to plan the financials workshop (3)
18. How to agree the financials
19. How to update the project risks
20. How to identify the concurrent initiatives
21. How to agree the change approach
22. How to agree the next steps
    
23. How to process workshop three’s outputs
24. How to finalize your business case
25. How to obtain stakeholder acceptance.

Bonuses

Workshop slides 1-3
Three sets of slides to use when running each workshop that take you and the workshop participants through each process step in turn

Value Proposition example
A real example of the value (not risk) dimensions of the value proposition to show you what a value proposition will look like

How to document project costs
A supplementary guide to the nature of project costs that you can use to ensure you capture all of the possible costs

What you measure is what you get
A value delivery management article by Jed Simms on how too many projects measure the wrong dimensions and therefore miss out on the available value and, therefore, what to focus on and measure.

The value of a value proposition
A short paper by Jed Simms on the actual value of generating and using a value proposition — which can be used to help convince management and others of the value of using this approach.

Worthwhile workshops
A value delivery management article by Jed Simms on why so many workshops deliver sub-standard results and how they need to be run and managed to best use the people’s time and knowledge.

In addition …to maximize the value of this Guide you should also use

1. Understanding Business Cases
2. How to define your project’s ‘desired business outcomes’
3. How to identify your project’s benefits
4. How to quantify your financial benefits
5. How to manage your business impact risks
6. How to manage your project-specific risks
7. How to manage your project’s delivery risks
8. How to manage your Critical Success Factors
9. How to plan change
10. How to structure change

And it will be useful to read and use

1. Understanding Benefits
2. Understanding Prioritisation
3. Understanding ‘Project Success’
4. How to initiate a project
5. How to complete your business case
6. How to assess your business case
7. How to validate a project
8. How to submit your proposal to the Project Investment Committee (PIC)
9. How to approve and prioritise projects