Chapter 16. Develop Return on Investment

"Follow the money."

” Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) ^[1]

^[1] All The President's Men , Alan J. Pakula, Director; Carl Bernstein (book), Bob Woodward, Writer, 1976.

So you're nearly there. The final process in developing a complete, state-of-the-art business case is to finalize your project costings and to calculate the financial return on investment (ROI; see Figure 16.1).

Figure 16.1. Develop cost and ROI scenarios

You will probably do this after the RAP is complete, but, as for all our plan ning and project management processes, you'll have to completely involve your stakeholders.

In many cases, you will have to reconvene key participants of the initial RAP sessions to review the numbers , assumptions, and other key information required to complete an ROI analysis. In some projects, your stakeholders will need to consult , experiment, and gather information on current process costs, volumes , and so on, to validate cost and revenue models identified in the RAP session. As we discussed earlier, there will be a number of sessions required to complete this step.

In addition, most organizations have a project office that verifies the processes used in deriving the ROI.