Hacking Business Cases
tl;dr We hacked business cases for teams to buy small items and for people to go to conferences. If you like this you should come to our bureaucracy hack in July.
So why business cases?
Those of us who are civil servants have a responsibility to spend Government’s money responsibly. We should account for every pound — and make sure that every penny counts. For me, a penny wasted is a penny not invested in a child’s education, and that cannot stand.
Government makes spending decisions using ‘business cases’. These explain the rationale for investments and can range from a one liner (e.g. “We need to buy pens to write with.”) all the way up to hundred of pages for multi-billion pound programmes (e.g. Crossrail). A good business case is thorough but also proportionate. It makes no sense to write a 50 page business case for a light bulb — the time spent writing the case costs more than the item itself.
But herein lies the problem. Nearly all spending decisions call for some kind of business case (good) but government has turned the writing of business cases into an art (bad). This means you can only really get good at writing them through practice (or training). It is also inefficient for government to spend lots of money training people to write business cases. So what can we do?
What we did
Well this week we’ve had a go at hacking business cases — to try to make this important process of government more efficient and effective. We wanted to remove the art from business cases so that people could focus on the important bit : is this a good investment?
This week’s hack was a MadLibs(TM)-style business case for teams to spend small amounts on things that would either boost team productivity or improve user experience. It won’t be useful in every organisation but hopefully it’ll be helpful to some.
We also made a business case to justify attending conferences as part of our preparations for OneTeamGov Global in June last year. It can be easily adapted for other events.
So would a hack of business cases pass our five tests for a good, hack-able problem?
- Could be solved (or prototyped) in roughly a day — day-sized ✔️
- Can be easily grasped without too much domain knowledge — approachable ✔️
- Leads to a real difference — makes time for public servants to create more value — tangible ✔️
- Is a problem we can actually do something about — actionable ✔️
- Happens in lots of different places in the public sector — structural ✔️
So yes — it would.
It only took an hour or two for experienced people to create these ‘hacks’ but they have already saved hours of other people’s time. It just goes to show that these things don’t have to be big to make a big difference. This could be part of our series of exploring problems that could be part of a bureaucracy hack in July: Perhaps we could even hack a full library of business cases for the most frequently needed ones. Get in touch if you want to tackle this problem!
We’ll be opening registration for the bureaucracy hack very soon so keep your eyes peeled 👀.
Oh and if you’ve seen a good business case hack, post it in the comments below or tweet us and I’ll add it to the list here 👇.
