Three tools, three bills, and three sets of frustrated users. Here's how I structured the argument that got a $2M investment approved.
The company had grown through acquisition and organic expansion. The result: three overlapping tools doing roughly the same job, three separate contracts, and an internal team that had learned to hate all of them equally.
Engineering wanted to consolidate. Finance wanted the savings. But nobody had made a compelling, board-ready case — and without that, nothing would move.
I was asked to own the business case end-to-end: the analysis, the stakeholder alignment, the written document, and the board presentation. I had six weeks and a part-time data analyst.
I started by mapping the actual cost of the status quo — not just the contract values, but the hidden costs: engineering time spent maintaining three integrations, support load from users context-switching between tools, and the opportunity cost of not having a single source of truth.
The hidden cost was bigger than the contracts. License costs were $340K/year combined. But when we added engineering overhead, support time, and duplicated data management, the true annual cost was closer to $890K.
The full business case presentation as delivered to the C-suite and board. Includes ROI model, risk register, and phased roadmap.
Before the board presentation, I ran three rounds of stakeholder reviews: engineering leads, finance, and the heads of the two main user teams. Each session surfaced objections that I incorporated into the document. By the time the board saw it, the key internal stakeholders were already aligned.
"A business case that surprises the board has already failed. The real work happens in the weeks before the room."
Full Phase 1–3 budget secured at first board presentation.
Conservative case, 3-year horizon.
Phased to hit first savings milestone at 6 months.
Business cases fail for two reasons: they're not credible (the numbers look made up) or they're not aligned (someone important was surprised in the room). I've found that doing the alignment work first — even before you have all the numbers — makes the case stronger because you're incorporating real objections, not anticipating hypothetical ones.
Using the conservative scenario as my headline number was a deliberate choice. It invited scrutiny rather than avoiding it, and it meant every challenge in the room was one I'd already addressed in the document.