Before you sign the business case
When the ROI case arrives already written — on the seller’s template, filled in with the seller’s assumptions about how fast your people will actually use the thing — read it the way you’d read any document someone else has an interest in you signing: line by line, out loud if it helps.
Nobody needs to have padded it. A case built on the seller’s template uses the seller’s numbers because those are the numbers the seller has. The open question is which of them were ever checked by someone with no stake in the total.
The business case says
“Adoption reaches 80% of the target workflow within six months, based on comparable deployments.”
Comparable to what deployments — whose cohort, what sample size, what counted as “adoption”? Ask to see the underlying data before that number goes in your board deck. A number with no traceable source is a guess wearing a decimal point.
The business case says
“Estimated savings: 40% reduction in manual review hours.”
Read the whole model end to end. Every line subtracts — headcount, time, review hours. Not one line grows. Whether this deployment adds anything is not something the model can tell you. Whether the model was built to look is. A model that only measures what shrinks makes your own best people the rational opponents of the project: their caution looks like resistance, when it’s actually correct incentive-reading.
The business case says
“Benefits will be tracked by the programme team.”
Who is the programme team — and did they write the case? If the party that championed the case also reports whether it worked, the check is being run by the person with the most to lose from a finding: a sponsor has more at stake in an honest result a year in than on the day the case was approved. That is not dishonesty. It is a role nobody was assigned.
If the initiative is built in-house, the template is the builder’s, not the seller’s. The same questions apply, with “the vendor” read as “the team that built it.”
If your best people read this business case, would they see themselves as beneficiaries of it, or as the savings being harvested? If it’s the second, the model fails before anyone signs it.
“Because whoever builds the ROI model has a position on how it turns out — and the person who signs it inherits one.”