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27 Feb 2019

Who Manages the Business Case in an Agile Development Environment?

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The main people responsible for the business case preparation in an Agile environment would be: Product owners, product managers, Head of product, Director of product, and in case of a govt. organisation you would have few additional roles of Digital service managers (DSM) and Service responsible officers (SRO).

Depending upon the structure, culture & policies of the company, there could be broadly two approaches towards creating a business case:

Bottom-up and Top-down approach for business case

1.Bottom-up approach: Example of a completely Agile organisation that has multiple product teams and a central product management function. They would take this approach where all the individual product teams would prepare their business case for what they think should be done for their product/service. They would follow the common business case template, look at their customer problems, their product roadmap, and present their business case. All these team-level business cases would be discussed by the core business propositions team to green-light the projects they deem aligned with the company’s mission & vision.

#Pros: Democratic, collaboration, team’s input, high morale, ground-level details considered in business case preparation

#Cons: Too many business cases, might be too disparate, time consuming

#Ideal for: A mature central product team with expertise and common skills to think through business case preparation.

2.Top-down approach: Example of an Agile organisation that has multiple product teams and a central product management function, and operates in a hierarchical decision-making structure. They would take this approach where a set of business cases have been prepared aligning with the company’s mission & vision and the types of products & services they have. This would be passed down to the individual teams as their Objectives which they would translate into goals & tasks at their product level.

#Pros: Faster, less time consuming for individual teams, company’s objectives & mission/vision at the core of such business cases

#Cons: Might alienate individual teams, doesn’t necessarily address ground-level issues, chance of not hearing the customer’s voice

#Ideal for: A big organisation where there is a risk of divergent strategies in play if left with the teams, or in cases of Government bodies, where there is a set mandate or policy to be implemented by the product teams

If you have any other questions, do write to us and we will get back to you with the best possible solution.

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Thanks,

Onkar Singh Lohtham | Founder & CPO | Lead Trainer

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