Business Case
Overview
At the Vision stage you will have decided to pursue delivery of your corporate services through a shared services model and you may have identified a long list of options for the delivery of shared services. If you are a shared services provider you will have developed your business plan for the expansion of your service.
The Business Case stage of the toolkit covers some of the key activities that will help organisations determine the detailed costs and benefits of their preferred option(s) and decide which option to progress.
Key activities are identified, such as the creation of a detailed business case, a high level description of the future operations and development of a change management strategy. It also includes templates, guidance and example documents to assist in the preparation of a business case and the detailed analysis and assessment of options.
Key Considerations
- Check your business case costs and assumptions for completeness (see Business Case Financial Checklist [PDF, 137KB]), e.g. licenses, decommissioning, data cleanse and retention, business change, existing staff time, backfill and redeployment.
- Have you baselined your current service? Are customers satisfied? How does it compare with industry benchmarks?
- Have all benefits, tangible and non-tangible, been identified? e.g. service improvements, cost savings. Do you have senior owners for all benefits and have they signed up to them?
- Consider an independent review of your costs and benefits.
- Have you identified risks and do you have a risk management plan in place with clear risk owners and managers?
- Have you identified your critical success factors/key business requirements?
- Have you considered your MI requirements? These are often not considered until too late in the shared services journey.
- Have you got any special requirements, e.g. data sensitivity and types of data that need to be maintained? Do you know how these would be addressed and what the additional cost would be?
- Have you identified the options for delivery that best fit your requirements?
- Is the target operating/service delivery model defined? Do you understand the scope of the shared service and what this will mean for the retained functions?
- How different is the new openess model to the current one? What business change activities will be required to embed the new ways of working?
- How well do you understand your current processes and procedures? Moving to a shared services solution will often mean aligning your own processes to those of the provider.
- Have you considered how the provider/customer will work together? Do you understand the annual running costs including the charging regime for additional and new requirements, legislative upgrades etc.? How will risks and benefits be shared? The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) should set out clear boundaries of responsibility.
- Have you considered how the new processes and systems will be rolled out to your users? (i.e. will it be a ‘big bang’ roll–out or phased; by function, region, business area. Will you rollout the new IT in advance; in parallel?)
- Do you have sufficient business change capacity to support your preferred rollout approach? Have you reviewed, prioritised and potentially stopped other projects? (this may release scarce resource).
- Have you developed a programme plan and do you have resource in place with the right skills and experience to deliver it?
- Have you engaged the Trade Unions? This should be done as early as possible. Your starting point for engaging the Trade Unions should be the departmental Trade Union side.
