A section-by-section business case skeleton where each part carries a statement of what it must establish, so the finished document persuades by evidence rather than by length.
Most business case templates tell you what headings to write under. This one tells you what each section has to prove, which is a different and harder standard. It sits here in full, free, with no gate in front of it.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
A finished draft is the best possible input for challenge. Send it to selected senior operators from the Global Board and get a confidential report on where it would fail in front of a sceptical approver.
Challenge the assumptions before committingThe weakest cases are often the longest, because volume substitutes for logic. A strong case makes one argument: this option, at this cost, beats the alternatives including inaction. Every section either advances that argument or should be cut. The skeleton below assigns each section its burden of proof.
| Section | What this section must establish | Length discipline |
|---|---|---|
| Executive summary | The decision requested, the cost, the benefit, the main risk and the recommendation, readable by someone who reads nothing else | Half a page, written last |
| Problem and cost of inaction | That the status quo has a price, quantified, and who is paying it today | One page; if inaction is genuinely free, the case ends here |
| Options considered | That at least two real alternatives were examined seriously, including a minimal or phased version of the proposal | One page; each rejected option gets its actual reason for rejection |
| Recommended option | What is being bought, built or changed, in operational terms a non-specialist can verify | One to two pages, no vendor prose |
| Full-life costs | Every cost to the point of decommissioning: licences, people, backfill, change, integration, exit | Table plus notes; finance signs the completeness, not just the arithmetic |
| Benefits and their owners | Each benefit quantified, dated and attached to a named executive whose targets change when it lands | Table; a benefit without an owner is an aspiration |
| Risks and mitigations | The three or four risks that could sink the case, with mitigations that cost something | Half a page; ten trivial risks signal the real ones were not named |
| Sensitivity analysis | What happens to the case at benefits minus 30%, costs plus 30%, and twelve months of delay | Three scenarios; if the case only works in the base case, say so |
| Implementation approach | The first ninety days in concrete steps, and the capacity they consume | One page; detail beyond ninety days is pretence |
| Decision requested and conditions | Exactly what approval is sought, in what tranches, and what triggers a return to the approver | A quarter page, unambiguous |
Draft the cost-of-inaction and sensitivity sections first, not the recommendation, because those two determine whether a case exists at all. The author should be whoever will own delivery, with finance co-owning the cost table from the first draft rather than auditing it at the end. The executive summary is written last, by the author alone, in one sitting. A summary assembled by committee reads like one, and approvers notice.
Every internal reviewer of a business case shares the author's context, and often the author's hopes. The question an internal review cannot reliably answer is whether the argument would survive a reader with no reason to want it approved. Selected senior operators who have sponsored, approved and killed cases of similar scale provide exactly that reader. Their report reaches you before the approval meeting, when it can still change the document.
Following the length disciplines above, eight to ten pages plus appendices. Anything past fifteen pages usually means the argument is weak somewhere and the volume is load-bearing.
The memo is a one-to-two-page instrument for making a specific decision in a meeting; the business case is the full evidential document behind a major commitment. For big commitments you often need both: the case as the evidence, the memo as the ask.
Adapt the headings freely; keep the burdens of proof. The value is not the section names but the standard each section is held to, especially cost of inaction, benefit ownership and the three-scenario sensitivity test.