Making the Business Case for People Analytics
In this:
Imagine walking into a board room where some of the best business minds of all time are having a discussion.
Ray Croc, a self-made hamburger magnate (as the founder of McDonald’s), famously said, “You’re only as good as the people you hire.”
Larry Bossidy (who has led GE and other engineering companies) pounds his fist on the table and rasps, “At the end of the day, you bet on people, not strategies.”
Mary Kay Ash (of Mary Kay Cosmetics) gets the last word with a gentle correction: “A company is only as good as the people it keeps!”
Croc, Bossidy, and Ash, where all were talking about people but technically were saying very different things. Ray’s focus was on hiring, the problem of acquiring differentiated talent (the universal problem I call attraction). Bossidy was focused on the never-ending battle with the variability of performance, what he calls “execution” (the problem I call activation). Ash was concentrated on retention (the universal problem of attrition).
These iconic CEOs were not alone in their point of view about people. The statement “People are our company’s greatest asset” is served up by over 6 million websites and counting, as measured by Google Search.
Virtually every leader of a great company will admit that results stem from people. The problem is that they don’t know how or what to do about it. There is an endless list of things that could be wrong. There is an endless list of changes that could be beneficial. The giant iceberg ahead in front of the ship is that everyone talks about people being important, but without data, they don’t know where to focus. So they miss valuable opportunities to act on their stated beliefs, and they run right into the iceberg.
Countless dollars have been frittered away on lame ideas: the flavor of the year best-practice HR program, ineffective wellness initiatives, or training programs that insult or bore. Too much money is spent on things that don’t achieve their objectives and too little money put into other things that could. While you could take the cynical view, don’t give Human Resources any more money, my opinion is to continue to invest in people programs, but create more analytical scrutiny and accountability of how the decisions are made and revised.
The money spent on employee compensation is a lot of money (generally 50-70% OF THE ENTIRE BUSINESS LEDGER). Still, when it comes to putting management time and resources into getting good at people, very few companies come up with anything of any noteworthy difference. Why is that?
The spend on people is massive but spread too thinly – as opposed to narrowly focusing resources on achieving advantages in a unique chosen set of jobs that matter for a particular business strategy. It is like going to the horse race and saying, “give me a ticket for every one of them (that way, I can’t lose).”
In large part, the problem is probably lurking in the short-term financial view rewarded by quarterly earnings report cycles. Little thought is put into the people-intensive activities that occur over the long term. Yet, if you’re committed to improving your financial results in the long run, you must work to improve the underlying drivers that produce those results — including those people aspects of your business.
How do you make a convincing argument for these people-oriented initiatives? You need to demonstrate a basic value model that illustrates where the results your company aspires to stem from and how people connect to that. (Figure 2-1 shows what a model like this would look like.)
Figure 2-1: Business value creation model.
After more than 20 years of working with dozens of different companies of different sizes and in all sorts of industries, I have never heard anyone dispute the logic of the diagram shown in Figure 2-1. So why don’t top executives usually pay more attention to the people’s inputs, rather than focus only on the business outputs? The likely reason is that in its current state of HR strategy is weak. There is no difference in most HR strategies – instead, there is a conspiracy of inane.
Achieving unusual results on the people’s input side — managing talent attraction, activation, and attrition — requires substantive management attention over an extended time.
<Remember> Sustained and substantive work devoted to building success through people — even when proven to move the financial needle — is not often the strength of those who have managed to work their way to the top. They made their way through what has traditionally been a sink-or-swim individual performance world in a fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants manner, so managing other people towards long term performance is a complete blind spot. Nevertheless, someone in senior leadership has to be convinced of how to harness the power of people as a group; otherwise, it will never be a priority.
<Tip> Unless you have a business sponsor who believes in the usefulness of people analytics from the start, you’ll have to find some supports for your arguments. Few busy executives will take it on faith that changing their approach to people is the best solution for reaching financial Shangri-La.
So, how do you demonstrate that what you can do with HR will help the bottom line? Simple: by using data. And yet, it has become a question of which came first — the chicken or the egg? You need data to sell your plan to get the resources you need to collect data, but you can use the data only after getting the required resources to collect and analyze the data. And around you go.
Somehow it would help if you made an argument for people analytics with data even when you don’t have enough resources to get data yet. I give you the best plays I have to get out of this pickle.
Getting People to Buy into People Analytics
People are open to new possibilities that change the way they do things when (and only when) they believe those things meet their needs. To boil down many years of economic and psychological theory, every action that people take is because of dissatisfaction. People feel dissatisfied in their current condition, for some reason. Because of this dissatisfaction, they are internally motivated to take action to relieve it. Think of it like quickly jerking your hand from the stove when the pan is still hot. The discomfort triggers a response to ease the pain and to achieve an expected state of increased happiness.
Getting started with the ABCs
An easy-to-understand theory known as the ABC model spells out how to get people to do something different. (See Figure 2-2.) The letters ABC stand for antecedents, behaviors, and consequences.
Figure 2-2: The ABC behavior influence model.?
In the context of the business case for people analytics, the antecedents (A) represent the first part of the story that supports why you want people analytics. The A part can consist of the previous experiences and feelings of the executives you’re trying to convince. Sometimes, that is some pain they are experiencing with employees. Sometimes, what propels executives forward are the observations they make about another company’s efforts in people analytics. Sometimes, what moves executives forward is the convincing arguments of the salespeople who want to sell your executives a new system or service. The A part gets the process started, but it usually isn’t enough to get you all the way there.
The middle letter, B, refers to the behaviors that are necessary to move from antecedents to consequences. Members of your executive team may need to change the way they make decisions, they may need to invest some money in some systems, or they may have to be willing to let you go collect some data. Given that B involves effort and risk, A and C had better be quite compelling.
The consequences (C) represent what the people you’re trying to convince want to happen. What are the implications of engaging in people analytics or not engaging in people analytics? In my experience, C is probably driving 80 percent of the motivation to buy into your business case. The consequences have to be sufficiently large enough to pull people through the costs or hard work of B.
Creating clarity is essential
One reason for the lack of interest in people analytics is that the people you want to convince don’t understand how they will be better off with people analytics than without because they haven’t seen good yet. To put it bluntly, executives don’t know how the supposed benefits justify the cost or the trouble that’s caused by moving from the current state to the proposed state that people analytics offers.
<Remember> People rarely make substantial changes or investments based on a general premise — no matter how seemingly sound. People make significant changes and investments to improve their condition in some way. Executives won’t buy into your business case for people analytics unless they believe that their results or social standing will improve or feel that some relief from a previous obligation more than justifies the potential cost and trouble. Therefore, focusing your business case on how the person you want to convince will be better off, in the end, is the key to your success.
Business case dreams are made of problems, needs, goals
Contrary to popular belief, solutions in themselves have no value. Solutions derive their value from the problems they were meant to solve. I know there’s a good chance that the reason you picked up this book is that you already sense that you have a problem that people analytics will help you with; you haven’t fully baked that problem definition until it has crispy edges. Your business leaders probably haven’t defined the problem yet, either — much less realized that it’s a people problem you can solve with analytics. At this point, most business leaders still aren’t accustomed to looking to data to solve HR or management problems that relate to people, let alone looking to HR for data.
The first step in making a business case for people analytics is the same as the first step in starting a people analytics project: Clearly define the problem. People analytics is a solution, and solutions derive their value from the problems they solve. Without a problem, a solution has zero value, so people analytics isn’t the starting point of your business case.
First, you need to understand the problem. It starts with demonstrating that you have a deep understanding of the pain the business generally (and the business leader personally) faces. However, developing that deep understanding takes some serious work and much conversation.
Here are some questions for you to work on answering:
*?What problem can people analytics help solve for the person you want to buy into it?
?*?What is the need that people analytics will satisfy for the person you want to convince?
?*?What goals can be achieved by people analytics to help the person you want to convince?
*?What is the pain that people analytics will take away?
If you can answer one or more of these questions with absolute clarity, you have a good chance of getting your business case approved. If you can’t, you’re on thin ice.
If you don’t have absolute clarity, meet with more executives and ask them to specify their problems, needs, goals, and pains.
<Tip> If the executives want to turn the conversation to what you do, don’t go there. It’s better to keep them talking about what they see as problems than to have them focus on what you see as problems. Stay away from what they think you want to hear — always return the attention to them and their issues.
Tailoring to the decision-maker
Here's a scenario: If you were proposing people analytics to a CEO whom you know values a fully engaged workforce and is concerned about productivity levels across the enterprise, you might start with the problem that the company needs to learn more about — why employee engagement is down in some groups and up in some others and how to control it. Therefore, you want to study the drivers of employee engagement. You are using your CEO's language.
Knowing what’s relevant to the decision-maker you’re trying to convince and using that person’s language are right strategies. If your CEO believes (or can be easily convinced) that employee engagement is a problem, this could serve as your opening.
Alternatively, your CEO may believe that employee engagement does matter but may not perceive it to be a problem. In this case, you have more work to do. Then it would be best if you found out what your CEO perceives to be a problem. After you understand that, you can explore whether he or she would be interested in looking for the people connections to help her/him solve that problem.
In addition to identifying the problem that’s important to your CEO, you also have to understand how she or he makes decisions. People have different preferences for evidence. For some people, the evidence that other successful companies are using people analytics already may be a compelling enough reason for your company to do it too. Other people may have higher standards. They may need to be convinced with a different argument, like this: “Management is important to our future, and management is about people; therefore, people analytics can help us manage better.” Finally, some people may be convinced only by a spreadsheet showing a specific dollar ROI per program.
Keep digging until you figure out the right way to talk to each particular decision-maker that you need to persuade to proceed.
<Tip> Influence = IQxEQ^2 To influence the stakeholders who will decide whether your project proceeds, you need the perfect balance of offering solid ideas (Intelligence Quotient/IQ) and offering them in a way that connects with other people (Emotional Quotient/EQ). If EQ represents “people smarts,” it serves both the solution you present and the way you give it, so I squared it.
Your challenge is to define that problem for yourself and articulate it in a way that your potential executive sponsors can understand. Doing this requires, in effect, that you peel the onion. For more on that, see the next section.
Peeling the onion
The particular business problem you’re dealing with depends on circumstances. At first, the business problem may not sound like it has to do with people at all. Still, if you ask the question "why?" enough times consecutively, you usually arrive at some point where the behaviors of people (or the actions they do or don’t take) prove crucial.
Think about all the ways people matter to business results:
*?People invent products and services.
*?People interact with customers.
*?People do the right things for each other and the world — or they do the wrong things.
All the things that people do or don’t do have consequences. The thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors of people affect business results. With this concept in mind, it seems evident that people analytics — a method designed to understand people — is useful at some level. However, though you and I are convinced, you aren’t done yet. Now your work starts.
Have you ever heard some variant of this statement: "A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved" - John Dewey? The truth quotient is high for this one. The more you understand the problem, the more you and others can see how people analytics can help solve the problem.
In this context, “peeling the onion” means that, after you identify a probable problem, you continue asking probing questions to uncover evidence of the problem. The evidence is useful in putting together a compelling business case.
The evidence
?*?Proves or disproves the problem.
?*?Demonstrates the magnitude of the problem.
*?Provides a measurable expression of the question for analysis.
*?Assists you in identifying the drivers of the problem.
*?Provides a starting point to measure progress.
I’ve found these questions useful in conversation to peel the onion:
*?How do you know that this is a problem?
*?What measurements show evidence of this problem?
?*?What is the situation right now? What would you prefer it to be?
*?What do you think causes this problem?
*?Which causes do you think matter most?
*?Where, precisely, does this problem show up?
*?Whom does this problem affect most? Whom does it affect least?
*?When does this problem occur most often?
If this exercise fails to produce any compelling problem for people analytics, your next option is to show the executive a problem that they didn’t know. They didn’t realize that they have a problem with people, but maybe they should. For this, you need to find a way to collect a little data without much investment. Lure them in with a free taste test to see whether they decide to buy.
Identifying people problems
Sometimes you need more than a high-level argument to sway others to a people analytics way of thinking about people. Part of the problem is that everybody has an opinion about people, and most folks are unwilling to change their views. When faced with an opposing view, most retreat to their corner and say, "Well, you have your opinion, and I have mine.” To progress beyond such a stalemate, you need more than just opinions about people — you also need some facts about them.
In my professional experience, executives who have had a small taste of data-derived insights about people cannot resist wanting more, particularly about people at their own company. There are many ways to tempt executives, but you can hardly go wrong with these four metrics:
*?Win/loss ratio of hires and exits to your top competitors: If the majority of number-one picks whom you contact from your competitors reject your recruiters' inquiries, that’s a problem. If you lose a large percent of your offers to candidates to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, or Google (known collectively as FAANG), that’s a problem.
?Maybe FAANG isn’t bothering you, but the same competitor is poaching a large portion of your employees in critical jobs. That’s a problem. This info isn’t challenging to find — it and could prove to be quite an eye-opener for the executive team.
*?Voluntary employee attrition rate by business segment: You can look at division, job function, performance rating, tenure, and region and any other segment that matters. When you start to look at data like this, you inevitably see something that inspires the interest of executives or strikes fears deep into their hearts.
*?Engagement percent by business-relevant segments: Engagement is an index of survey questions that measures the degree to which employees are committed to the company and motivated to apply discretionary effort. Research shows a large percentage of employees are so frustrated at work that they’re just standing by and collecting a paycheck, with no motivation to do anything more than the bare minimum. An executive who can see data from the company’s people indicating a problem may be open to pursuing a people analytics strategy to resolve the situation.
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??*?Likelihood to pursue a new job opportunity in the next 12 months or likelihood to recommend the company as an employer: Again, you can learn many things from a simple survey question. You would be shocked to realize what people will divulge. These questions have been found to correlate with actual outcomes and business performance.
These fundamental insights are not expensive or difficult to acquire, and they’re entry points to start generating interest and questions to which to apply more advanced people analytics. Most importantly, these insights can elevate problems to the attention of executives — issues they may not have otherwise known about.
<Remember> After you have identified problems, needs, goals, or pains, you have a good start — but you still have to figure out the best angle to persuade the executive to invest money and time. To answer this, you have to understand how the executive you want to influence is motivated.
In the following sections, I give you three options: inspired by feelings, driven by time or money, and driven by the need to lead.
Taking feelings seriously
One of the most important discoveries to come out of recent marketing research is that people buy the feeling they anticipate enjoying as a result of purchasing and using the product or service. Counterintuitively, people don’t buy your product or service based on a logical assessment of the product’s features; instead, they buy based on the emotion or psychic satisfaction that they imagine it will trigger or stimulate. This is why product quality, service, and relationships are essential product differentiators.
To put a marketing research spin on things, what is the feeling that an executive will experience after buying into this idea of people analytics? What you need to do is present the executive with a picture of how people analytics will generate deep feelings of security, comfort, status, prestige, warmth, or personal connection.
Think about what lies under the surface of the executive’s emotions. Does the person want to feel the pride of being on the leading edge? Feel superior to his or her competitors? Avoid being left behind competitively? Feel more certainty and control?
<Tip> Outside of general feelings about people, it’s an advantage to know about the problems in the company that this executive is consumed with at the moment. If you talk about that business problem and pose the question "why?" enough times, generally, it comes back to a people issue.
Adding desire and fear to the mix
Some people believe that only two primary motivations underlie all actions: the desire for gain and the fear of loss.
Here’s a fear-based argument: Imagine, if you will, that if you do nothing to correct specific trends in your enterprise, there’s an increasing risk of diverse candidates bringing an adverse-impact lawsuit against the company at some inopportune moment. The business case for people analytics may be simply this: “Don’t let the company fail to do the right things, resulting in an embarrassing and expensive loss in court. Instead, let’s get ahead of this thing with people analytics to find ways to remove bias from our decision processes.”
If you would instead make a positive business case, what you say may be more nuanced. It may be sharing a summary of all the ways that Google and other well-branded companies are using people analytics to revolutionize their HR efforts. They’re deriving business advantages from people analytics, and you don’t want your company to be left behind.
Keep in mind that the promise of good outcomes is more motivating to some people and that the fear of adverse outcomes is more motivating to others.
Note: Keep an eye out for the consequences of inaction as well. Another way to convince a stakeholder is to talk about what will happen if you don’t do something to solve the problem.
Saving time and money
Some people like those business cases that are all about saving the company time or money. In business, you pay for time, so time and money are interchangeable.
The business cases that are used for business intelligence and data science teams usually stress the fact that the company is already spending a substantial amount of time and money preparing reports and analysis for executives; they’re just doing it inefficiently. The business case isn’t centered on whether the company should be making the reports — the business case is based on an argument that implementing a system or a centralized team, or both, will reduce the time and money spent generating the same information.
A similar argument can be made for HR if reporting and analysis work in which executives already find value is already occurring. The business case for making a change is that they can get the same information more efficiently if they give you the money. (This may work in situations where you’re already doing something with data, but probably won't work in cases where you aren’t.)
<Tip> You may be better off pointing out that the company is already making a lot of HR-related decisions without data and that using data will allow the company to make these decisions better or faster or for less money than using the archaic decision-making processes.
Leading the field (analytically)
At a high level, you mostly have these three options to run HR:
*?Low cost (don’t even try to compete): You can go for a low-cost, low-frills HR operating model where you're just expecting your HR people to run basic processes legally and as efficiently as possible. You’re running plays that have been run by large companies for over 100 years, so what could go wrong? You’re abiding by government legislation and “pushing paper” as accurately and as fast as you can. If it doesn’t seem to be going well, you're not going to know why, but do feel free to fire the head of HR and try again.
*?High quality (follow the leader): You aspire to be like the best companies in the world, so you copy the things they do in HR. If they change their 401k match, you change your 401k match. If they go to open-office floor plans, you go to open-office floor plans. If they give employees beanbags and ping-pong tables, you give your employees beanbags and ping-pong tables. If they offer free lunches — well, maybe you can’t do that, but you give one free lunch per week, or you discount the company cafeteria or do something related. These are simple examples of “best practices.” You aspire for high quality, and you’re okay with copying, but you don’t want to invent it.
?Best practices might sound great, but the problem is that you don’t have unlimited time and money, so you still have to choose. And there's the rub: How are you supposed to choose? You don’t know why the other company does what it does. You don’t know positively whether it works. You don’t know whether it’s profitable. You don’t know whether it was designed to solve a problem that you don’t have. You don’t know whether it creates other, unforeseen issues. That's many you-don’t-knows. How do you choose?
*?Innovation: If you do the hard work of asking essential questions about how people connect to business results and the best way to manage people, you’ll find your way to answers using data and experimentation. You’ll run your HR department more like a curious science teacher than a hard-liner hall monitor. You’ll look for empirical certainty about the decisions you make that impact workers’ lives — from whom to hire to how much to pay employees to which benefits to offer.
If you choose the third option, you’ll need some data. Maybe that’s what your executives want you to create. Can you paint a compelling picture of what this will look like? If so, this in itself may be enough to be convincing, given the alternatives.
People Analytics as a Decision Support Tool
The increasing use of technology, enterprise systems, and online recruiting platforms like LinkedIn is generating more information and data than ever before. There’s a common understanding that something in this data might be useful but that, as with a messy closet, people struggle to find what they’re looking for.
The solutions you implement in people analytics are intended to cut through the accumulations of data to find the insight you need to make better decisions and improve performance.
Decisions about people are some of the most important and impactful decisions a company can make. Think about all the decisions that are made about people in business:
*?What type of people to hire
*?When to hire people
*?How to hire people
*?How many people to hire
*?Whom to hire
*?How much to pay
?*?How to reward
*?What to train
*?When to train
?*?How to train
And so on. The sum of these decisions made about people in business is demonstrated in the large amount of money that companies spend on payroll and benefits, as reflected in their ledgers. Indeed, the quality of these decisions impacts the quality of the results of all those expenditures. Essential and expensive decisions will be made regardless; with people analytics, you're just better able to connect the dots.
How well decisions are made comes back to the quality of the thinking of the people who make the decision and the information they have to make it. Those who apply data and analysis to make decisions have an advantage. Most business areas where crucial decisions are made — finance, marketing, and operations, for example — have already learned and applied this simple fact. Not using data to human resources puts HR executives at a substantial disadvantage in obtaining support and resources on a relative basis to leaders of finance and marketing. It also puts the company at a considerable disadvantage to other companies.
If you want to get down to brass tacks, here's the deal: People analytics allows you to measure company performance at a much deeper level than you could before — right down at the people level — which by necessity will enable you to
*?Learn from the past to improve results in the future: Whether you’re talking about information gleaned from the hiring process or employee surveys or employee exit interview data or some other type of data, people analytics allows you to learn what is working or not working more quickly so that you can make the adjustments you need to improve performance. People analytics provides the measurement feedback to hold everyone accountable for the effectiveness of the actions we decide to take.
*?Predict future performance with greater accuracy: Before the world had a deep appreciation for biology and medicine, it used to be that, when a person fell ill, doctors (if you want to call them that) had a hard time predicting what would happen. After science helped doctors develop more insight into what was occurring inside the body, doctors could do a better job of predicting what would happen when they observed specific patterns. Often, these predictions allow humans to take actions that change their future or the future of others. (For example, if your blood pressure is high, you do something about it with an intent to change the course of a future impending heart attack.) With people analytics, you are doing the same thing by looking deeper into the body of the company, which allows you to measure the health of the company to increase your ability to predict future company outcomes and take actions that provide more control over company outcomes.
*?Focus efforts to improve on things that will have the most impact per dollar input and let go of things that have no significant effect: Many people management and HR practices are based on myths, falsehoods, contradictory ideas, ideas that never really worked, and other actions that worked before but no longer do. People analytics ushers in a new way of being for HR that directs it to apply resources to activities that will have the most impact and take away actions that do not.
*?Manage more effectively: With people analytics, you can bring forward data, spot problems, and work together to solve problems with enlightened collaborative group participation rather than an authoritarian "gut instinct" management style.
*?Know that you’re doing the right thing (and be able to defend that you’re doing the right thing): People analytics can help you make employment-related decisions that are less biased and that provide ongoing transparent feedback, which by nature will result in a more diverse, inclusive, and ethically managed company. These same analytics can be used to defend the decisions that were made with both internal and external stakeholders.
*?Reports and analyses can be used when the company is taken to court or to meet the stated requirements of the Equal Employee Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Formalizing the Business Case
What kind of business case you create depends on the characteristics of the decision-makers, formal processes established to make decisions, and the culture of your company. Some places might require an official report and a polished presentation in the boardroom. Other companies might be satisfied with a slideshow presentation, a short memo, or even an email. The requirements probably vary, depending on the magnitude of resources you’re asking for.
Regardless, a great habit to form as you begin your people analytics journey is to assemble the following (if for no other reason than the clarity of your thinking):
*?Problem: The precise definition of the problem that you worked so hard to define at the beginning.
*?Problem evidence: The symptoms demonstrate the problem is real.
*?Problem impact: The effects that this problem has on the business.
*?Solution: The scope and substance of the solution you propose. Create a vision of how good the situation will be after you implement the solution.
* Solution evidence: The criteria that determine that the solution fixed the problem.
*?Solution impact: The benefits that the company stands to gain.
?*?Process: The steps you’ll need to complete to implement the solution.
*?Cost: Estimates of the funding the project needs.
?*?Timeline: Dates and milestones for completing the process steps.
You might also want to include a summary of the other solutions you considered, the criteria you used to choose the solution, the methods you used to estimate the gains the company will realize, and other specifics from your notes. If you’re presenting this report to executives, though, you should put that detail in the appendixes at the end. One-page summaries on the front of a lengthy document aren’t called executive summaries for nothing!
Presenting the Business Case
The business case itself lays out the problem and the proposed solution. Presenting the business case to stakeholders is an opportunity to evaluate that business case. You confirm that the problem is a real pain point in the company and that the solution you proposed is sound. If you’ve been bouncing ideas off the stakeholders throughout the process, this part of the presentation should yield no surprises.
The presentation also gives the stakeholders the chance to dive into specifics, such as making sure there’s money in the budget for software licenses and confirming the availability of executives, human resources, and IT to work on the project.
<Tip> Build a modular presentation with time for questions between modules. A monolithic speech that never stops for air will lose your audience.
I like to structure my business case presentations like this:
1.?Thank everyone in the meeting for the time they have invested to this point. Let them know it helped develop the business case you’re about to present.
2.?Remind the room of everyone’s mutual self-interests.
3.?State the objectives for the presentation. Say something like this: “Our objective today is to find out whether the people analytics approach we are suggesting will meet your needs. If not, we want to understand what would have to change.” Leave the door open to try again if they don’t love your business case.
4.?Review the big picture around the problem.
?5.?Review the problem evidence and problem impact. Ask the stakeholders to make sure you didn’t leave anything out. Let them add, modify, or delete.
6.?Review the solution evidence and solution impact. Ask them to make sure you got it right and that you didn’t leave anything out. Let them add, modify, or delete.
7.?Discuss the decision criteria. Does the proposal have to show how the project aligns with an existing company objective? Is there a maximum budgetary requirement? Is there a particular return on investment (ROI) requirement? Is this project in competition with other projects for resources? Is there a specific way you want the business case presented???
?8.?Propose the solution steps, costs, and timeline.
9.?Review how the proposed solution addresses the problems and satisfies the decision criteria.
10.?Decide to proceed (if all goes well).
11.?Discuss the specifics of timing, who’s doing what, and project funding.
Ultimately, the business case presentation allows the stakeholders to decide that this is an excellent project to start and that now is an excellent time to start it. If you’ve defined the problem well and sold the solution, you’ll soon be starting your first people analytics project.
This is an excerpt from the book People Analytics for Dummies, published by Wiley, written by me.
Don't judge a book by its cover. More on?People Analytics For Dummies here
I have moved the growing list of pre-publication writing samples here: Index of People Analytics for Dummies sample chapters on PeopleAnalyst.com
You will find many differences between these samples and the physical copy in the book - notably, my posts lack the excellent editing, finish, and binding applied by the print publisher. If you find these samples interesting, you think the book sounds useful; please buy a copy, or two, or twenty-four.
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