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.