Getting Your Boss To Agree To Your Plan
Whenever you need approval for resources, or to commence a program of work, you’ll most likely need to convince your boss that it’s a good idea.
As a CIO and finance executive, and later as a CEO, I assessed hundreds of investment proposals, and I made decisions based upon whether or not the business cases were solid, rational, and ultimately representative of the truth.
When I analyzed an investment proposal, I looked for it to answer a few basic questions:
- How much is this going to cost?
- What do I get for my money?
- When do I get it?
- What’s likely to get in the way of achieving the stated benefits?
- How big a hole are we in if it all turns to custard?
If you were asking me for resources, your job was to convince me that the proposal was a good idea?
After all, there’s only one thing I know for sure about every organization… you will never have enough time, money, and people to do all the things that you’d ideally like to do.
So, you have to make choices… and, at any point, you have to be satisfied that you’re doing the things that deliver the biggest bang for buck.
Michael Porter, the father of modern strategy said – “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do”… so there is a relativity to any investment:
- What are my other choices for deploying these resources?
- Are those choices better, in relative terms, than the one in front of me now?
You are in competition for your organization’s scarce resources – which is why many companies use the term, “capital rationing”.
Your boss is much more likely to agree to support your investment proposal if it’s comprehensive and well-written… and, when I say “comprehensive”, I just mean that it covers all the major food groups!
There are 6 key areas you need to address:
- Strategic Fit
- Financial Benefits
- Non-financial Benefits
- Assumptions
- Risks
- Supporting and Technical Data
If the investment is large, say, $50m? You might want to walk through the proposal in some detail, and present a lot of data to support your request. It could be 100 pages long…
But if the investment is small, say, $50,000, you can probably cover off everything you need to in a page or two!
The one critical truth you need to accept is this: if your proposal doesn’t clearly demonstrate a path to delivering tangible value, it doesn’t deserve to be approved!
So you want to convince your boss… how do you reliably do that?
In Ep.126 of the No Bullshit Leadership podcast, I laid out the 10 critical factors that are likely to determine whether or not your boss will approve your investment proposal.
This includes things like:
- Being crystal clear on the value proposition;
- Knowing your boss’s motivations; and
- Being really familiar with the language of business cases, including the financial metrics that will be used to assess it.
If you can learn to put forward a compelling case for value creation, you’ll be much more likely to get your boss to agree to your plan.
And if that isn’t enough? Well, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all?!