As a practice leader, you’ve built a resilient practice through uncertain times. Business is booming, and your team is top-notch, but keeping up with growth is becoming more difficult. When practices can't hire fast enough, your teams become overworked and are forced to decline new work.
Rapid growth is a good problem to have, but left unmaintained, and your team is at risk of burnout. Client service and work quality will suffer. Add in the current remote and likely permanent hybrid staffing models, and these risks are compounded.
While a strong hiring strategy is critical for any leading practice, technology can get more out of your talent. To scale human expertise, look to technology: modern workflow automation and collaboration software will set your practice up for success today and in the future.
At Fieldguide, our team has helped leading assurance and advisory practices deliver successful business cases in record time. If you are ready to supercharge your practice, here is our guide to crafting a winning business case for adopting new technology.
Delivering a winning business case
We recommend a brief presentation deck that clearly frames strategic and business impact and confidently outlines a plan for success. As you work with Fieldguide, our team can partner with you to build your case.
1. Executive Summary
Establish yourself as a strategic thinker and technology leader with a strong opening. This slide summarizes the overall project goals, analysis, recommendation, and anticipated business impacts on a single slide. Additionally, framing the project in the context of your firm’s overall strategic agenda will ensure that your initiative is clearly investable.
2. Problem
Dive deeper into the problem you’re solving. Explain your practice’s current process and software environment, as well as the risks of maintaining the status quo. This context will help your audience better understand how you arrived at your final recommendation.
3. Analysis
Walk through the options considered and your evaluation across various factors. What was your decision criteria when evaluating the status quo, compared to “build versus buy” options? What were the results of your analysis?
4. Recommendation
Provide an overview or process diagram of what the target state would look like, powered by your recommended software solution. Help the audience understand how the new practitioner and client experiences could be differentiated with technology.
5. Implementation
By now, you’ve established yourself as a thought leader in the latest technology on the market. Your audience will be looking at you to chart the firm’s course. What does a successful implementation program look like, and what resources are needed to deliver the intended business impact? Does it make sense to sequence onboarding by practice, or should we group practices that have clear service overlaps? Longer term, does this initial project have the potential to bring positive change to additional practices across the firm?
6. Financial
Show the firm’s expected return on investment, including cost savings from replacing legacy software and expected benefits from adopting the new solution. Benefits include increased efficiency, improved margins, the ability to service more revenue, and enhanced client experience. Investment costs represent software costs and internal resources required for implementation and maintenance.
7. Risks
A change initiative may introduce risks, and being upfront and communicative about them will ensure a more successful implementation. Be sure to complement implementation risks with the risks of “doing nothing,” such as lost revenue from turning away work.
Additional best practices
Before building your business case, take time to understand your firm’s software procurement process. Who are the decision-makers and influencers you need to involve, and when do they need to be brought into the process? Though one obvious stakeholder is the budget approver, we recommend earning your practice’s support by inviting them to a product demo. Transformations are more successful when the prospective users are excited about the change. These future power users can help champion your initiative alongside you. Finally, don’t forget to engage your firm's Information Technology organization for necessary vendor diligence approvals.
Invest in technology and growth
At Fieldguide, we’ve helped many leading assurance and advisory practices build their technology foundations for the future. Facing accelerated software needs, practices are moving faster than ever to invest in both technology and growth.
To learn more about Fieldguide, request a demo today.
January 12, 2021
