Friday, 20 May 2016

Project Statement of Work Versus Business Case

Project Statement of Work(SOW) and Business case are both inputs to project charter process as we see in PMBOK guide and here is where the information within PMBOK guide may differ slightly from how you experience it in practice. 



So lets start with project Statement of Work (SOW),It is the document coming from requesting party , requesting party may be an internal team or customer ,but it is the statement that all the work they need must be completed. It is a description of what they need, what business need they have and how the project will meet their business needs.

Business Case on the other hand is done by the sponsor of the project and Business Case is essentially the justification to get a project. They want to look at project work from a value perspective versus how much the money they have to pay to get the project done.

Lot of time you will see in Business Case benefit measurement such as Net Present Value (NPV) or Internal Rate of Return or Returns on Investments (ROI), Essentially the business case if going to justify the funding for the project 
Example :
Let's Say There is an Organization ABC , That ABC organization wants your company to provide training to their employees for PMP Training, they would send you a State of Work which includes "2 Day Fundamental Training for Project Management at Mumbai, India" 
You would evaluate that and say okay well let's see here how much you will be charged for , x amount i have to to my instructor, to pay for materials and travel etc and you would weight those two.
Sometime it is also worth to take on a project which may not have a positive business case means you may have negative NPV chances for such kind of projects are Regulatory or Compliance driven or infrastructure driven.

Both the project SOW and the business case are critical inputs to the development of the project charter. The SOW is generated by the requesting party, detailing what they are requesting, whereas the business case is developed internally, usually by the project sponsor, to provide a financial and feasibility analysis of the project.

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