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Business Case Development: Costs, Benefits, Risks, ROI
3,172 students
Business Case Development: Costs, Benefits, Risks, ROI
business case | cost benefit analysis | ROI | risk management | budgeting | KPI | business analysis | NPV | payback
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Frame a proposal as Problem, Goal, Constraint, Metric before writing a single number
- Build a cost model that covers people, training, software and the overheads everyone forgets
- Calculate the return on an investment and know which parts of the benefit are honestly quantifiable
- Choose the indicators the case will be judged on, using critical success factors rather than what is easy to pull
- Assess risk properly with ISO 31000, a risk heat map, the risk hierarchy and escalation
- Recognise the cognitive biases inside your own estimates, which is where most business cases go wrong
- Read the economic and regulatory environment well enough to defend your assumptions when someone challenges them
- Present the case in financial language: three statements, the terms executives use, and the argument they expect
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
15 sections • 40 lectures • 18h 1m total length
Requirements
- Something you need approved. The course is built around producing one real case
- No finance background needed. The three statements and the terminology are introduced from scratch
- Comfort with a spreadsheet, since the cost model and the return calculation are built in one
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to write down the assumptions you would rather leave vague
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Proposals are rarely rejected because the idea was bad. They are rejected because the person deciding could not tell which numbers were estimates and which were wishes, and defaulted to no.
A business case is the document that removes that doubt. Most people write a summary of their intentions instead.
Why good proposals get refused
The costs cover the obvious things and miss the overheads, so the number is wrong in a direction everyone recognises. The benefit is described qualitatively — better, faster, more engaged — which cannot be compared against anything else competing for the same money. The risks section says "resistance to change may occur", which is not a risk assessment, it is an acknowledgement that risks exist. And the whole thing rests on assumptions that were never written down, so when one is challenged the case collapses rather than adjusts.
How the course is built
Thirty-eight lessons following the structure of a case. Framing first, six lessons from business analysis: telling a symptom from a problem, the Problem, Goal, Constraint, Metric framework, the AS-IS and TO-BE view that most cases are actually about, and impact analysis when the scope moves.
Then the context your assumptions live in — eight lessons on the business environment. STEEPLE and SWOT, Porter's five forces, inflation and interest rates, regulation and international trade, demographic trends, and finally the three financial statements and the terminology the decision-maker uses. That last lesson is the one that changes how your proposal reads.
Costs, benefits and the risk section nobody writes properly
Then six lessons on building the cost side properly: what can genuinely be budgeted, linking a budget to strategy, calculating the return, and costing people, training, software and the overheads that appear after approval. Including how to build the case for something whose benefit is indirect.
Then eight lessons on the benefit side — critical success factors before indicators, impact mapping, the measurement traps, the reporting hierarchy, and the six myths that break most measurement systems. If your case promises an improvement, this is where you decide how anyone will know.
And ten lessons on risk, which in most business cases is a paragraph and should be a section. ISO 31000, the heat map, the risk hierarchy, escalation, the three lines of defence, and the cognitive biases sitting inside your own estimates.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have had cases approved and cases refused, and the refused ones were almost never refused on the idea.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Start with the uncomfortable list
Take the proposal you want approved and write out every assumption underneath it — the ones you would rather not draw attention to. That list is the case. Everything else is presentation. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers who have to get budget approved and have never been taught how a case is built
- Business analysts moving from requirements into investment justification
- Project and product managers whose proposals get "not this quarter" with no explanation
- Consultants preparing recommendations that have to survive a finance review
- HR, IT and operations leaders funding initiatives that do not obviously produce revenue
- Founders preparing an internal or external case for spending money
- Anyone whose last proposal was rejected and who never found out on which number