Writing Business Cases

Our members ask for our help in the production of business cases in three ways:

• Teaching staff who are new to business case development the basic skills required to complete a simple case competently
• Working with experienced practitioners to develop more complex cases
• Supporting the development of large, complex cases such as Foundation Trust Integrated Business Plans or large capital cases.

Business cases bring together our core philosophy of combining skills transfer with practical project support and sharing of good practice across the network. The elements of this approach include:

•  Basic and advanced business case seminars
• Working with real cases in a workshop environment on member sites
• Writing cases and providing commentary on cases being developed by our members
• Identifying the key benefits sought from a case, using this to generate a good list of options and weighted assessment criteria
•  Using Monitor’s “Risk Evaluation for Investment Decisions” guidance to create risk management models and due diligence strategies
• Extending risk management into sensitivity analysis in order to understand how resilient plans are to a range of scenarios
• Financial assessment; cost/benefit analysis, economic and financial evaluation, discounted cash-flow, long term financial models
• Assessing “programme management” issues to test how practical the options are
• Researching similar cases in the NHS Elect network
• Applying the Treasury Green Book business case assessment framework
• Supporting the development of Foundation Trust Integrated Business Plans

For more information contact Jim Timpson at jim.timpson@nhselect.org.uk