Q: We invest a lot of time building business cases that go through multiple rounds before approval. How can Peak Output help with that?
A: In this second video in our productivity series, we are looking at one of the most resource-intensive and frustrating cycles in any organisation, the business case approval process.
Here is the reality. Business cases often fail not because the idea is poor, but because the communication missed the person reading it.
Peak Output improves this at two distinct points in the process.
The first is in the building of the case itself. Knowing the natural talents of the people constructing a business case allows a leader to deploy the right people in the right roles. A highly detailed, analytically wired person should be building the assumptions and financial modelling. A big picture, visionary thinker should be shaping the narrative and the strategic rationale. When you match the task to the talent, the quality of the output improves and the time to produce it drops significantly.
The second, and perhaps more immediately impactful, is in how the case is written for its audience.
Presenting volumes of data and detailed assumptions to a visionary, big-picture decision-maker is unlikely to get a positive response. It may not even get a full read. That leader wants to know the opportunity, the strategic fit, and the bottom line. Lead with those and the conversation moves quickly.
Equally, submitting a high-level narrative to a CFO who is analytically wired and detail-focused, without rigorous assumptions, clearly evidenced projections, and a thorough risk analysis, will not get through either. That approver needs the depth before they can commit.
Getting this wrong does not just slow the process. It consumes the time and energy of the people who built the case, the people who reviewed it, and the leaders who had to manage the iterations in between.
One of our clients, leading a large team, tracked exactly this. Before Peak Output, the average number of interactions required to get a business case through their internal approval process was four and a half. After applying Peak Output insights to how cases were written and presented to specific approvers, that dropped to one and a half interactions. The same outcome, in a third of the exchanges. The productivity gain across the team was substantial, and the quality of the decisions being made improved alongside it.
Know your approvers. Write to how they think. And get your best case in front of them the first time.
