The IC Team Golden Ticket - Step 4: Making your business case

Embracing the full rainbow

When it comes to achieving everything you want this year, it's is a matter of pulling everything together from the first three steps of your Professional Development Plan, which we explored earlier this week.

From Step 1 you can identify:

1. the current situations which are holding back you and your team
2. the specific causes of those situations
3. the likely emotional and reputational costs that come with them – and who’s likely to be experiencing those costs
4. the alternative situation you want to be in
5. how that new status quo will enable you to reduce those costs

From Step 2 you can demonstrate:

1. some of the direct financial costs to your organisation of staying where you are
2. the likely impact you could have on those costs if you were to have everything you desire.

From Step 3 you can spell out the:

1. new resources you, and others, will require in order to achieve those business results
2. investments (one-off and ongoing) needed to secure those resources
3. projected ROI your team should realistically be able to deliver. The financial ROI would be a specific number, but you can also include commentary on the likely emotional and reputational payback which would be almost inevitable knock-on effects.

Together, these should enable you to secure everything you want for:

• yourself,
• your team,
• your clients,
• approval group members, and
• anyone else who might need to be supported...

...so you can give of your best each day this year, and all the years to come.

(Step 5): Repeat as necessary

It may be that, once you’ve got your ideal working situation set up, you’ll be good to go for years. Or you may need or wish to revisit it as circumstances change. The important thing is that you now have a formula you can follow to secure everything you need for your career, wherever it takes you in the future.

How we can support you

As with the other steps, we have templates all ready for you to use, to make this a simple fill-in-the-blanks job. They can make the numbers as easy as pie and also help you with the delivery of your business case, be that in the form of a report or a presentation.

And you can learn more about how we can make this whole process as quick and easy for you as possible:

We hope you’ve found these articles useful. If it’s left you with any questions you’d like us to answer, by all means get in touch.