BVA – Business Value Assessment
Every company will do a kind of Business Value Assessment to see if the investment the project team is planning is worthwhile.
If you don’t proactively support the client in this stage, the ROI calculations will be done on the usual internal measurements (e.g. cost cutting), without a chance to enrich them with how their business could be supported.
However, if you have a strong relationship with the stakeholders you will be able to influence the metrics that are being used in the calculation. Good sales people are actively engaged doing process audits collecting the metrics and convincing stake holders to buy in in one or the other saving by showing the how the picture could look like.
During such a process audit or value assessment you get to know a lot of people and learn a lot about problems, politics and other issues of your prospect so that in the end you probably know more of what needs to be done than the employees themselves.
Best practices tips to setup a Value Assessment/Process Audit
- Get the sponsorship of the economic buyer
- Let Champion or EB send the stakeholders an email to support this assessment
- Schedule 45min to 1 hour meetings with the respective stakeholders where you show what your offering is capable of and discover the metrics.
- Do the meetings with one stakeholder at the time. They or more likely to be open when their peers are not around.
- After collecting all the metrics, separate the hard facts (tangible values) from the soft facts (intangible values) – The ROI calculation needs to be based on the hard facts enriched with the soft facts on top.
- Crosscheck findings with your Champion and “polish” them to be bullet proof.
- Crosscheck with stakeholders to get their buy-in on findings. If the EB turns back on them to support the numbers they should be convinced to do so!
The result should be a bullet proof ROI study justifying the investment into your offering that you can present to back to the EB in an Echo Back meeting.
In the BVA, you will find the following milestones by default:
Why Do Anything?
See The 3 Why’s section for more information
Budget