[MUSIC] We have outlined the various aspects of the HR life cycle, and we have identified various metrics that we wish to measure. We have talked about ways we can display what we are measuring by the use of dashboards and scorecards. Now, we need to talk through what do we do with these numbers, the KPIs we were measuring. How often do we find trends and needs with the data and metrics we're tracking? And how do we find them? Before we build out our business case, we must identify trends and needs that we are finding within our metrics. We need to utilize both internal and external data when we build effective metrics, and we can use external data when we're building an effective story. So let's recap on metrics and data. Recall in one of our readings metrics and data help compare different data points. For example, if turnover was 5% last year, and it is now 7.5%, it's increased by 50%, the former our data points, the latter is the metric. So, step one in our journey, let's find the data. Where do we find data points? Well, internal data is gathered typically by the company. You can find this in HR systems, financial systems, corporate financials, engagement survey results, and exit interviews. The second is external data. This can be found on the Internet, professional association reports, and benchmarking associations. External data is found outside. It is typically, something very helpful for me when I'm trying to build an overall story to get money. So our second step is how do we turn our data into a metric? Metrics expand on the data. It doesn't determine a cause or make an opinion on the data. Instead, it measures the difference between your numbers. Analytics measure why something is happening and what the impact is on what's happening. It's our third step. Analytics is what helps us build their story and identify what we need to build a business case for. Our goal is to use our analytics to determine what we can focus on to impact our business objectives. Depending on your organization, the effectiveness and the process to ask for programs or money varies. However, something that's critical regardless, is making sure you know your budget aptitude for your organization. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Taking action to solve, evolve or impact a business objective requires HR teams to be mindful of your business's ability to absorb, change, and implement. You have to be able to sustain the change that you're looking to implement, and these are key concepts when building your business case. You might be asking what exactly is a business case, and why do I need to know how to build one? Let's use an example we outlined earlier. We know that our turnovers increased by 50%. We've used external data to know that seven and a half percent turnover is in line with industry norms, but we know using internal data that's above our business norm. Let's pretend that finance gave us data around our sales decline and the ramp up time for a new hire was slipping. Let's pretend we conducted an employee survey, and our managers, and our longer tenured associates were very frustrated with the constant churn. And the impact the training was having on their productivity was huge. Let's also say that reviewing our exit survey data, the lack of training, and use of online training tools was a concern for our new hires, a reason they were leaving. After we reviewed all of our internal and external data, and we looked at the metrics. And we determined our need was to invest in a new online self-paced training tool and those tools would cost $200,000. We need to build a business case to justify our spend of $200,000. Beyond just getting the approval for the money, we also need to ensure if approved, we can implement adopt and sustain the training that we've just invested in. Building a business case is really just a way in which you tell a story to influence, and we do say by utilizing numbers. The business case is not just about the data and the metrics, it's about how we create analytics to justify a value and a need for our business, all right? Now, let's go through how we build the business case. At the end of the day, a business case is a way of presenting a compelling story to achieve approval for an ask. Your ask should always align with your business objectives be supported by data and have measurable results. After reading more articles, I would like to admit and building my fair share of can I have money business cases? I've come up with a ten item checklist above. This will help you get ready for an effective presentation. Step 1, in building an effective business case is identifying who are you trying to influence? Who do you need buying from? Who benefits from this ask and who is the biggest naysayer of your ask? It is important to have a level of executive sponsorship when asking for money time and specifically when a larger change management initiative is on the table. I am a firm believer in HR, and we are not the people who should be running the HR projects. They are people projects, and they're best led by the business and influenced and guided by us. I have found finding or convincing an executive who is most skeptical of your proposal to be the business sponsor is a pretty good start and effective way of getting closer to an approval of a request. We don't have time to influence all decision makers. It's critical to focus on the individual decision makers who have the most influence on the program decision or people who are proposing to. Step 2, demonstrate your credibility. Ensure your business case has substantial data and metrics that support the analytics you have found. As you build out your data, remember two rules. The iceberg rule which means 10% of your work actually gets presented or in other words, don't overuse data and clog up your story. Your business case is a story and a good story has data focused on specific case or arguments. And they provide a correct amount of data to support the most important parts instead of unloading too much data onto your audience. The second rule is the golden rule. Make friends with a knowledgeable person in finance. They can review your presentation for inaccuracies or discrepancies, poorly identifying problems. Lack of metrics or data and poor project cost estimations are three very common reasons why business cases for HR professionals get rejected. Offend in finance is invaluable. Step 3, make sure you spend time to explain how this all fits into your culture. What are your business imperatives and how does this ask align and tie into those goals and objectives? Step 4, outline how the program will improve competitiveness. This is a great way to bring in external data and to help validate your quest. Number 5, outline how this project will succeed. Be honest with the project's probability for success, and what is it that will be required for this project to succeed. Provide external data sources and examples where your solution has worked in other companies. If possible, bring in external consultants to validate your findings. It's important to show that you have conducted research and evaluated how often your request has failed or succeeded in companies outside of your own. My own personal story on the importance of this step is around the buying and support you will need from the business. Be honest with the time and commitment you will need from everyone, this will be key. Step 6, outline the economic impacts. How will this project drive sales or margin? How is it going to create growth? How will it decrease turnover or increased innovation? Think through what your business wants and needs. What are you trying to solve for, and how is this project going to impact the bottom line? Step 7, highlight your project plan and timeline. Make sure the group knows the key milestones and deliverables. It's always great to ask for an executive sponsor at this time, mostly at the business level. Projects are key growth opportunities for high potential talent suggesting to have someone in the business be the executive sponsor is a great way to help them move throughout their career too. Step 8, demonstrate the what's in it for me. How do you ensure that your request offers something to those that you are requesting it from? Human nature typically leads to wanting to know what benefits something will give to them or their team specifically. Focusing on how your request will benefit a person's job or financials or the image that might be important to them. Having a strong EQ on what makes your leaders tech will be important. Step 9, be flexible. Be ready with alternatives and cost rollout or project ideas and details. Be open to hearing other ideas that you may not have thought of, and if needed be opening to circle back with the group to evaluate these alternatives. Remember, our goal is to support our business not to die on the vine for our ideas. A third alternative, sometimes is best outcome to any presentation. The last step, own your timeline and outcomes. Remember the prior steps, owning our data, the ROI, and our credibility. These are all things that we have to make sure happen. Make sure you invite key stakeholders along on this ride, schedule follow-ups and check ins. Be honest to deliverables and if the dates or the outcomes change, let the group know. Your credibility on how you manage this project will be very, very important to your key and future successes. As we build up this business case, these really are just the ten things that I check off a box as I'm going through and building out either my PowerPoint, or maybe it's a written business case. Whatever form you might be building your business case in, again PowerPoint, Word. I use these ten items and make sure that they show up throughout my presentation. So now, let's going to actually tell the story and get some key tips and tricks on invoking the emotion to get a yes. Building a business case can be done in many ways. When you look at the tactics and how to build out a business case, I personally prefer creating a PowerPoint. As outlined in our Sherm reading, there are ten sections or main taglines that you might want to address when you're building your business case process. In some organizations, a business case can be a formal paper. And as I mentioned, I like to use a PowerPoint. It allows me to show my data in a visual way. I can use pictures to help tell my story and I can help build my case by invoking emotion. Let's go through the ten points of building a business case. Please remember, you might not use all ten of these areas. What is most important though, is that you utilize data correctly. You highlight what the problem is, how you plan to fix it and what the investment is going to be similar to be, some model we talked about in the previous slide. So let's talk about a problem statement. When telling a story you always have to have a plot. The problem statement that's your plot. Frame the problem, create your plot. What are we here to solve? When we look at the tension piece of any good movie, book, or story, where does that come into play when you're building your business case? As you build up the background, the project objectives, and the current processes, these can be your tension points. The background is telling the audience, how did we reach this conclusion? How do we know this is our problem? What metrics and data, graphs and charts can you show that led to why the group is meeting today? If possible, highlight any of the business impacts, dollars grab attention. When looking at the project objectives and the current process, outline in a very short concise way. Talk through what is your proposal and then go into detail as you look at the process. What in today's process is broke, what in today's process is missing. The proposed solution is affecting something. Use metrics and data to support your recommendation. Why the current process isn't working and why your future recommendation is what should be adopted. It's a great time as you're in this tension piece, to pull in external benchmarks and white papers to support whatever your ask is. As you move through talking about the problem, the background, the objectives in the process, you have to talk through the requirements. What do you need to complete the project? How much staff, how much money, how much materials, how much time? Those things are going to be important. You're kind of at your climax here in a story. What is this all going to cost? What am I going to need to do? What's the timeline going to look like? As you move into the action piece of a story, think of this of what's the process going to look like? And as we talked about, you also need to put in some other alternatives. What's the example that we are going to show and being flexible? What are two to four other alternatives that you're going to recommend? And as you move into comparing those alternatives, make sure you look at what the upsides and the downsides are. Use your data, use the metrics, draw the picture. As you go through looking at the alternatives and comparing them, make sure that all the additional considerations that you've thought about are also listed. Talk through what the ROI metrics are. Make sure you've let them know if there's any impact or effect on partners, vendors, internal or external customers. And as you go into the action and resolution of a story, you really do have to put what's your action plan? What are the exact steps going to be? What's the short term and long term needs? What are the objectives back to your problem statement that your business case is supporting? What are major milestones? This is your time to demonstrate credibility and timeline management. Now, the book or the article was Sherm talks about an executive summary at the end. I will tell you I always start with an executive summary at the beginning. The high level, one slider page that says, here's the problem. Here's what I'm suggesting, and here's how much it'll cost. I try to make sure that this is something that I can talk to that it's going to evoke the intention of the group when I'm going through the slides. I'm also going to give you some words of advice as you put your deck together. The fewer the words, the impact fullness of your graphs are going to be key. Don't write everything on a slide that you are going to talk to, your leaders can read. Make sure when telling your story you are able to articulate the problem in the solution they asked for versus making them read it. Expand beyond your PowerPoint, expand beyond your graphs and your charts, discuss what's not easily interpreted by reading the slide. Invoke the emotion to support your data. Every slide should have a data point on it. And as you look at your data points, make sure that you're eliminating clutter from graphs and from slides. Things like grid lines and borderlines and access labels and all those other things that take away from looking at the graph create more distraction, so make sure that it's less complex for your audience. And you can talk to it. Great storytelling should reveal truths which are hidden and not easy to interpret from just reading or browsing the data, or through a simple plot. This was the founder and CTO of the New York Data Science Academy. I love this quote, because as you're telling your story in your business case, you're the one that's capturing the audience and bringing them along on the journey that you just went through. Great storytelling can only occur, however, if you have a great business case, and you've done your due diligence around your data gathering. So with that, go out, build your business case, tell your story, and I'm very excited to the results that you are going to grab in your organizations. Let's wrap up this course, we focused on outlining the various sections of the employee lifecycle. We talked through data we could find metrics, we could measure, and why or why not those data points and metrics are important. We talked through what data is and what metrics are. We outlined within the HR employee life cycle, the different types of metric attributes we could use. All that help us build insights or analytics into our people operations. We then discussed how to display this data and create metric data points with dashboards or scorecards. We went over what we should think through, what our goals could be, and thinking through what are our targets. And what analytics should we derive from the visuals we've created. Today, we rounded out the course with putting it all together and building a business case for change. Utilizing the employee lifecycle data, our metrics, and analytics to tell a story around what we need and how this need will achieve a business result tied to the business outcomes. Thank you for taking this course. I appreciate you and I wish you all the best. [MUSIC]
