Is Better Business Cases Only for the Public Sector?

A construction firm's finance director once described Better Business Cases to me as "the government thing." He wasn't being dismissive. He'd genuinely never encountered it framed any other way, and on paper his assumption was reasonable. The Five Case Model, the framework at the centre of the certification, was built by HM Treasury. It sits inside the Green Book. Central government departments require it. Local authorities require it. Anyone who has worked near public procurement has seen the paperwork, and the paperwork says government all over it.

That history is real, and it matters, because it explains where the confusion comes from. It doesn't explain why the assumption is wrong.

To understand why the framework spread the way it did, it helps to look at what it was actually built to fix. HM Treasury didn't commission the Five Case Model because government projects are a special category of decision requiring a special category of paperwork. It commissioned it because public spending decisions were failing in a specific, repeatable way: benefits were asserted rather than tested, options were narrowed to a preferred one before the alternatives had been properly examined, commercial terms were assumed rather than negotiated, financial models were optimistic rather than stress tested, and delivery plans arrived after the money had already been committed. The Five Case structure, strategic, economic, commercial, financial, management, exists to force those five questions to be answered in order, before the spend is approved rather than after it's justified.

Nothing about that failure pattern is unique to government. It is, if anything, more common outside it, because private sector organisations don't have a Treasury Green Book sitting over their shoulder insisting on rigour. A board can approve a six figure investment on the strength of a single persuasive slide, and plenty do.

I saw this play out with a mid-sized engineering firm a couple of years ago, in a story that will be familiar in shape even if the specifics are anonymised. The board approved a facility upgrade on the basis of a two page paper: a description of the problem, a preferred solution, a headline cost, and a confident paragraph about the benefits. No alternatives were seriously modelled. No one in the room asked what the commercial terms with the main contractor actually locked in, or what happened if the supplier missed a milestone. Twelve months later the project was running considerably over budget, the "benefits" section of the original paper had become impossible to measure against anything, and nobody could point to the moment the numbers had actually been tested rather than asserted. Nothing about that failure involved government. It was a private company's money, spent the way the Five Case Model exists specifically to prevent.

That's the part the "government thing" framing misses. Better Business Cases isn't a compliance requirement bolted onto public projects. It's a decision quality discipline that public projects happened to formalise first, because they were the first to be forced to fix a widespread problem in a systematic way. Plenty of large regulated industries, utilities, infrastructure, transport, and increasingly private sector organisations delivering under frameworks that echo public procurement standards, have adopted the Five Case Model precisely because it travels well outside government. The framework doesn't ask whether the money is public or private. It asks whether the case for spending it can actually survive scrutiny.

It's worth being specific about what "surviving scrutiny" actually looks like in practice, because the phrase can sound abstract until you've sat through the alternative. The strategic case asks a question boards routinely skip: does this investment actually connect to something the organisation is trying to achieve, or has a solution been chosen first and a justification written backwards from it. The economic case forces a genuine comparison of options, including the option of doing nothing, rather than a preferred choice dressed up as an evaluation. The commercial case tests whether a deal is actually deliverable on the terms being assumed, which is precisely where the engineering firm's project came apart. The financial case asks whether the organisation can actually afford what it's approving, under something other than the optimistic scenario. And the management case asks who is accountable for delivery once the money moves, rather than leaving that question for later. None of those five questions belongs to government. They belong to anyone spending money on the strength of a promise about the future.

Private sector resistance to the framework, where it exists, tends to come from a specific worry rather than genuine disagreement with the logic: that a public sector tool will bring public sector bureaucracy with it, layers of sign-off built for a £50 million infrastructure programme applied to a much smaller and much faster commercial decision. That worry is fair, and it's also based on a misreading of what the framework actually asks for. The Five Case Model scales. A one page strategic case answering five sharp questions is still a strategic case. What it insists on isn't volume of paperwork, it's that the five questions get asked in some form, proportionate to the size of the decision, before the money is committed rather than after.

There's a simpler way to say all of this. Any organisation that puts a proposal in front of a board, a sponsor, or an investment committee is already doing business case work, whether it calls it that or not. The only real question is whether it's doing that work with a structure that forces the hard questions to surface early, or without one, hoping the gaps don't get noticed until the money's already gone. Most organisations doing it without a structure aren't being reckless. They simply haven't had the chance to see what a properly built business case looks like, because the only version they've encountered was framed as something built for someone else's sector.

The Five Case Model was never really about government. It was about what happens before a decision gets made, and that happens everywhere spending decisions do. If you're responsible for making a case for investment, wherever you sit, get in touch to talk about business case training that fits how your organisation actually decides.

Andre Malowney is a project management trainer accredited across PMI, APMG, APM and PeopleCert frameworks, working with both traditional plan-driven practitioners and Agile delivery teams. Find him on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/andremalowney.