Bubble PPM for building a
Project Business Case

Turn better ideas into better investment decisions

Successful organizations don’t rely on intuition! Bubble PPM can help you pick tomorrow’s winners and avoid risky flops.

Struggling to build your project business case?

Every organization has more ideas than it has time, budget, or capacity to deliver. The real challenge isn’t generating innovation, it’s identifying which opportunities deserve investment, building robust business cases around them, and then making confident portfolio decisions.

Bubble PPM software provides a structured, repeatable approach for capturing new ideas, developing evidence-based business cases, evaluating opportunities against strategic objectives, and prioritizing investments that deliver the greatest organizational value.

Whether you’re assessing new products, services, digital initiatives, capital investments or strategic change programs, Bubble PPM provides the governance, visibility and decision support needed to ensure the right ideas become successful projects.

Start by ensuring you’re doing the right projects

Good decisions combine a multitude of organizational priorities. Bubble PPM provides a consistent decision maker focused framework for leaders to compare all their early-stage opportunities fairly.

When deciding where to invest, it’s key to understand not just the idea but also the wider business case. For example:

The background to the opportunity
Whether or not similar ideas have been rejected prior
How achievable and desirable an idea is
The expected financial and resource requirements
Potential benefits and risks if the project is green lit

Long before you focus on doing your projects right, you must first ensure you’re focused on selecting the right projects.

Capture the project business case with forms

Whether its your product teams submitting innovation proposals, Commercial capturing customer opportunities or Operations recommending process improvements, Bubble PPM’s configurable forms make it easy to capture the key details senior leaders need to identify, prioritize and champion strategic investments.

See HERE how forms might benefit your organization.

image of form for initiating a new project business case

Screenshot of a project business case evidence form

Enrich and validate your opportunities in real time

Inconsistent project business case quality increases the risk that decisions will be influenced by opinion rather than evidence, which makes prioritization harder.

Bubble PPM gives project teams the chance to score and enrich their ideas as more information becomes available.

See the live status of individual ideas, at a glance

Quickly visualize key project elements, aggregate data, or foster ownership with dashboards that match the needs of your teams and their projects.

All dashboards are fully configurable, meaning you can inform stakeholder groups in whatever communication style best suits the organization!

Read more about Bubble PPM dashboards HERE

Screenshot of a project business case project dashboard

Screenshot of an idea management portfolio prioritization dashboard

Review your collective outcomes in the round

Bubble PPM software automatically rolls up any of the desired detail from individual projects up to your selected portfolios.

By viewing expected outcomes in the round, it’s easy to validate assumptions, consider options, and see desired benefits.

Flex individual plans as needs change

Bubble PPM software embeds all of your required detail into the plan.

Pre-defined stages, gates, milestones, and tasks ensure that mandatory requirements are enforced, while allowing users to add new items into their plan.

It’s the perfect mix of team flexibility and consistent governance for leaders.

Screenshot of a project business case gantt chart project plan and timeline

Prioritize the strongest project business case ideas and promote them to full projects

Capture exactly the information needed to make informed investment decisions. Use portfolio reports to display expected commercial value, costs and investment requirements, or key benefits – making it easy for leaders to evaluate, prioritize, or reject opportunities.

Screenshot of a project business case portfolio prioritization report

Screenshot of project business case promoted to a full project with notification

Automatically keep your teams updated

Once strategic choices are made, Bubble PPM software automatically sends out notifications to appropriate users, informing them of the change.

So, whether you’re communicating the outcome of an important review, or assigning a new team to a freshly approved development project, we’ve got everyone covered by the appropriate updates.

Ensure that each project business case aligns to your investment strategy

High-performing organizations assess dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of competing opportunities simultaneously.

Centralize idea capture, wherever it originates from

Submit and validate new ideas through consistent, open and objective processes.

Create configurable business case templates

Standardize capture of key information to ensure every business case is judged on equal terms.

Create and make use of weighted scorecards

Quickly assess organizational and strategic fit, long before committing to a full business case.

Evaluate finances

Compare costs and benefits by requiring business case submitters to identify forecast outcomes.

Build approval workflows

Route business cases to the appropriate reviewers to ensure cross-divisional buy-in.

Compare scenarios

Explore different investment priorities and portfolios before committing to individual proposals.

Maintain an audit trail

Add supporting evidence or retain data as a permanent record of prioritized activity.

Inform all stakeholders

Give leaders easy access to the facts needed to make investments and teams a real-time view of decisions.

Retain key records

Build portfolios of rejected business cases and interesting, but unfunded / unresourced ideas.

Fully customizable and rapidly deployable

Get the flexibility of custom software with the speed of out-of-the-box solutions.

Modular platform design that grows with your needs

Bubble PPM adapts workflows, fields, dashboards, and reports to match your organization’s unique needs – without lengthy implementations or custom development.

Start with what you need today,
expand as priorities evolve

Bubble PPM’s module-based architecture lets you activate capabilities when you’re ready – from portfolio management to strategic planning to project delivery – ensuring you solve your most pressing challenges first.

Visibility. Accountability. Efficiency. All in One Platform

Bubble PPM empowers organizations to deliver portfolio value and project success through three core capabilities:

Visibility

A single source of truth for all project and portfolio data – giving every stakeholder real-time access to the information they need.

Accountability

Built-in governance and workflows that align with your processes – ensuring projects follow the right steps from initiation through delivery.

Efficiency

Efficiency Automated dashboards and reporting that eliminate manual work – so your teams spend time delivering value, not compiling updates.

Building a business case?

Not all idea management software vendors are the same! If you want a solution provider that takes a true partnership approach to deployments, then read our Why Bubble page HERE or click the link below.

Download the brochure

Bubble-PPM-SaaS-Software-and-a-Service-Brochure

Want to know more?

Begin Your Journey Today

Request a demo or trial

Why do we have too many ideas and not enough investment budget?

PPM software, can help you prioritize opportunities objectively so funding is directed towards the initiatives with the greatest strategic and commercial value.

Why are we finding it difficult to compare competing project business cases?

One of the challenges of comparing competing project business cases is not evaluating proposals on equal terms. PPM software makes it easy to enforce consistent scoring criteria to make fair, evidence-based investment decisions.

How do we keep track of promising ideas that we're not ready to undertake?

Nobody wants promising ideas to fall through the cracks before they even reach development. Bubble PPM supports idea submission/screening, idea repository, and idea scoring to rank and prioritize new ideas. Meaning every concept gets a fair, structured evaluation – rather than letting it disappear into an inbox.

How do we prove which projects support the company strategy?

Investment decisions become easier to justify if you can clearly link a proposed initiative to known strategic objectives. PPM software makes it easy to align each idea or project business case to strategy, because strategic fit is just another categorization attribute, score or metric.

How do we standardize the format of project business case submissions?

Business cases arriving in different formats has to be one of the biggest executive bugbears. Nobody wants to be the leader who dropped the ball because they inadvertently compared ‘apples’ with ‘pears’! PPM software helps you to standardise submissions with configurable templates that mean something to your organization. That way, every proposal contains at least the core information that leadership needs to make decisions.

How can senior leaders speed up the time it takes to review proposals?

Project teams know that a lot can ride on the outcome of their project business case submissions. Even if they resist the urge to overshare data or detail, it can be an arduous task for senior leadership to see the wood from the trees. PPM software replaces the need for lengthy document reviews with dashboards, scorecards and executive reports that highlight what matters most.

How do we stop projects getting approved on opinion rather than evidence?

Projects being greenlit on the basis of gut feel, empty promise, or politics rarely helps any organization in the long-term. PPM software brings transparency to idea prioritization and investment, through the introduction of consistent pre-agreed criteria (or scoring) to opportunity assessment. There’ll always be edge-cases – where human factors override what the data tells you – but that then becomes a strategic discussion taking into account all known facts.

How do we stop promising ideas getting lost or forgotten?

With Bubble PPM, its easy to retain a permanent ‘organizational memory’ of what’s gone before. Portfolios of rejected, potential-filled, or unfunded but interesting opportunities can be accessed at any time. This eliminates re-work – because all ‘reasons’ are retained in perpetuity! It also speeds up the process of re-evaluation, when facts or influencing factors change, because you’re not starting from a blank page.

How do we reduce risk before committing significant funding to ideas?

Bubble PPM fosters greater collaboration, data sharing, and communication within and between project teams, managers, leadership, and customers keeping everyone aligned without relying on ad hoc meetings or the need to chase email threads.

How do we identify which initiatives will deliver the greatest business impact?

Comparing financial value, strategic fit and expected benefits is easy with PPM software. Using executive dashboards and portfolio reports, organizations can analyze opportunities side-by-side to identify the strongest opportunities. Meaning senior leadership always have the evidence they need to justify continued investments at their fingertips.

How do we maximise return from every project we invest in?

Organizations want to focus resources on the initiatives that offer the highest potential value while avoiding low-impact or duplicate projects. PPM software makes it easy to track both the big picture finances – by filtering project investments by portfolio, scenario, brand, customer, region or other factors – as well as the detail (e.g. by constantly validating and updating project business cases across the full duration of the project lifecycle).