How to prepare a business case for an IT solution? (Wrike-inlevel example)

Have you ever tried to create a business case for an IT solution?

It is definitely not an easy task.

First of all, it's not always clear what business benefits one IT solutions can bring.

Let's take a look at Wrike, a task / project management solution, I've written about recently.

As I've mentioned before, I've been using it for a couple of years, and I agree that it improves efficiency and reduces both time and costs connected with managing projects. That's what is presented on inlevel's Wrike product card.

Wrike can be used in various business areas, such as general management, administration or IT.

No magic here ;)

It is much more interesting, what business processes you can use Wrike to improve.

Most probably, the selection made here is not complete, but it gives a hint, what purpose you can use Wrike for.

Managing projects is closely connected with change management.

As I've written before, you can use Wrike for simplistic account management.

Last but not least, it can be used for managing and sharing information connected with your activities.

Then, it's worth trying to define what kind of solution Wrike is.

Yes, it is called "practical project management", but it also touches your email, calendaring and collaboration activities.

Clearly, it's delivered in SaaS / web services model.

OK, but how would you measure potential effects in your organization connected with introducing Wrike?

inlevel offers a number of predefined commonly used and pretty general key performance indicators. 

Among the ones that can be affected are new projects performance (pretty obvious), customer care performance (when using Wrike for issue tracking), sales opportunity performance (when using for account management) and order fill rate (when using for task tracking in provisioning / delivery).

Probably this list is not complete, and depends on your particular situation.

Nevertheless, inlevel gives you a number of potential starting points and parameters for preparing your business case.

It's also worth mentioning, that this classification can be used in search for discovering software tools.

Try searching for "calendaring collaboration" on inlevel. What will you find among returned search results? Yes, Wrike :)