Kicking off TFDP Business Case Festival
Jonathan Turton
With all 101 TIPs submitted to MHCLG, some towns are already developing their business cases and others have been awaiting agreement of their Heads of Terms to get going. Regardless of where you are in the process, the TFDP Business Case Festival will provide more in-depth support for you during Stage 2.
Business Case Festival is taking place over 12 – 26 April, and it will include good practice sessions on each of the cases in the Five Case Model as well as on stakeholder engagement for business cases. The sessions are aimed at those who will be developing or managing the development of your Towns Fund project business cases, and they will provide the next level of detail on shaping quality business cases for successful projects.
We have brought together business case experts from across the TFDP consortium who will bring in real life experience of developing business cases, from simple to complex and small to landmark. They will share their insights with you and will offer plenty of time for Q&A.
The Business Case Festival schedule is provided below, and you can sign up on our Events page.
Building good business cases can feel like a big hurdle. Business Case Festival kicks off our support to help make the process productive and engaging. We will offer tools, resources and advice to turn a potentially daunting task into a means to translate the vision and strategy of your TIP into a plan for tangible outcomes. This will include how to consider the proportionality of your case—the appropriate level of detail based on the characteristics of your project.
The development of your business cases should enable you to make good decisions by structuring and capturing your thinking for a project, ensuring all stakeholders understand and are aligned on the why, what, and how of the project. It can help you to quantify the opportunity, prioritise your activities and capture key assumptions and risks.
You may have read some very long, complex business cases in the past, but that does not mean that all business bases have to be soulless and dull! A business case must tell a story – and, ultimately, demonstrate that your ideas will enable you to meet your goals.
Think of your business case as a tool to make good decisions. The sessions in Business Case Festival will walk you through the key stages of developing and writing your business cases. You should leave the sessions with more clarity on your approach to each case to lay the foundations for the next level of detail of your thinking.
We hope you can engage with our events and resources over Business Case Festival. All events will be recorded and posted online alongside the resources. And, as always, if you have further questions, your Town Coordinator is on-hand to link you up with an TFDP expert or other towns who might be asking similar questions.