--- name: business-case-builder description: "The business case discipline pointed at a deal instead of an internal investment: the cost of the status quo, what the deal costs, and the quantified value it returns — with payback period and 3-year return on investment (ROI) computed, not asserted, and every value driver's basis and confidence named so a champion can defend it without you in the room. Use when: The deal is heading into a procurement or finance approval step, and your champion needs real ammunition to defend it internally. You've already built a value hypothesis and want to turn its proof points into an itemized, dollar-denominated case. Not for: You don't have real discovery yet — build a value hypothesis first; this tool assumes the buyer's needs and proof points already exist, not that you're inventing them here. The purchase is small enough that a formal business case is pure overhead — forcing this process onto a simple deal adds friction without adding a real decision-maker who needs it." --- # Business case builder The business case discipline pointed at a deal instead of an internal investment: the cost of the status quo, what the deal costs, and the quantified value it returns — with payback period and 3-year return on investment (ROI) computed, not asserted, and every value driver's basis and confidence named so a champion can defend it without you in the room. Family: Kaizen events · Format: .xlsx · Domain: commercial ## What it is A business case builder is the document your champion carries into their own budget conversation, without you in the room — the same discipline as the canonical business case, pointed at a deal instead of an internal investment. Cost of the status quo, what the deal actually costs, and a quantified value driver for each benefit, with payback period and 3-year ROI computed from those numbers rather than asserted. Every value driver carries how the number was derived and how confident you actually are in it, the same honesty discipline as a value hypothesis's proof points — a driver with nothing real behind it is named as a gap, not smoothed over to make the total look stronger. ## When to use it Use it when: - The deal is heading into a procurement or finance approval step, and your champion needs real ammunition to defend it internally. - You've already built a value hypothesis and want to turn its proof points into an itemized, dollar-denominated case. - You want to know honestly which value drivers are backed by real evidence and which are still an assumption worth flagging before finance finds it first. Not when: - You don't have real discovery yet — build a value hypothesis first; this tool assumes the buyer's needs and proof points already exist, not that you're inventing them here. - The purchase is small enough that a formal business case is pure overhead — forcing this process onto a simple deal adds friction without adding a real decision-maker who needs it. - You're tempted to round a soft estimate up to look more decisive — a business case that can't survive a skeptical CFO's first question isn't actually ready yet. ## How to fill it in - **costOfInaction** — What does staying with the status quo keep costing the buyer, and why does that matter before their next budget cycle closes? - **investment** — Describe the deal roughly — license, implementation, services — and a first-pass itemized estimate gets drafted for you to correct with real numbers. - **valueDrivers** — Drafted from your description of the deal — each with how the number was derived and how confident it actually is. Ground these in real discovery or value-hypothesis findings wherever you can. - **roiSummary** — Computed for you from investment and value drivers — nothing to enter here. - **assumptions** — Drafted alongside the value drivers — what has to stay true for the champion's numbers to hold up under questioning. - **narrative** — Drafted executive summary — the shape of the case in words, never restating the computed numbers itself. - **nextSteps** — What needs firming up before this case goes to the buyer's own finance team, ranked by impact and effort, owned and dated. ## What good looks like The example below builds Northline Freight's business case directly on top of this catalogue's own value hypothesis for the same deal — rather than presenting the pilot's headline $310K figure as guaranteed value, it applies a named, conservative 25% recovery assumption and states that assumption explicitly. A third driver honestly stays at low confidence: it borrows the exact 'business case never quantified' failure pattern Beacon Analytics' own deal A3 found costing its own pipeline, applied speculatively to Northline's future renewals. Full worked example, on-screen and as a downloadable .xlsx: https://www.katafacts.com/katas/business-case-builder ## Common mistakes - **Presenting a pilot or reference figure as guaranteed value instead of applying a real, named assumption to it.** — A prospect's own finance team will ask what makes this deal different from the reference case — a number with a stated, defensible assumption behind it survives that question; a borrowed headline figure doesn't. - **Padding the case with a low-confidence driver dressed up as certain.** — One number a skeptic can disprove gives them permission to doubt every other number in the case, including the strong ones. - **Omitting the cost of inaction and only pitching the upside.** — Without a real cost to staying put, there's no urgency in the case — the champion needs both halves of the argument, not just the half that flatters your product. ## What it connects to Upstream: - **Value hypothesis** (`value-hypothesis`) — A proof point already quantified in a value hypothesis is exactly what turns into a value driver here, with its basis already half-written. - **Discovery call standard work** (`discovery-standard-work`) — The compelling event and cost-of-inaction evidence gathered in discovery is what a business case's cost-of-inaction section is built from. Downstream: - **Deal A3 — win-rate root cause analysis** (`deal-a3`) — When a business case doesn't land and the deal stalls anyway, that's exactly what an eventual deal A3's root cause analysis would trace back to. ## Where AI helps Judgement — stays with you: - Deciding whether a drafted value driver's basis would actually survive a skeptical finance team - Deciding which low-confidence driver to firm up before the case goes to the buyer Analysis — AI helps: - Drafting itemized investment and value drivers from a description of the deal - Drafting the narrative from the case actually built Drudgery — automated: - Computing payback period and 3-year ROI from the numbers - Tallying which value drivers are still low-confidence - Exporting to xlsx in the house format --- Business case builder is licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Attribution: Katafacts (katafacts.com). ## Using this skill Apply this method as part of whatever broader task, instructions, or deliverable you're already working on -- it's a method to use, not a standalone conversation to start. There is no generation tool for this catalogue yet, so draft the artifact's actual content yourself, following the fields above, the same way a person filling this out by hand would. The canonical guide page and a downloadable worked example (.xlsx) are at https://www.katafacts.com/katas/business-case-builder.