Your projects and the client's business case

It is still proving difficult to get a precise understanding of how interactive companies are working with their clients to help achieve their companies' business priorities. The clients' business priorities drive their budgets which influence the range and type of projects they undertake. As business priorities shift, the type of projects you’ll get involved with will shift too. Have you noticed any changes over the last 18 months? If so, does the shift reflect changes in your clients' priorities?

You may be able to define things better if you are aware of how general business priorities are changing. Gartner research at the beginning of the year predicted 10 top business priorities and 10 top technology priorities. See Gartner Newsroom January 2013.

Steve Ranger at ZDNET (13th August 2013) notes that business intelligence and legacy modernisation have moved to the top technology places from 2012, while the top business priorities are delivering operational results, improving IT applications and infrastructure and reducing enterprise costs.

Of course, there may well be differences in the type of priorities across the size of companies and the sector they are in. This is borne out best by the explosion of social media projects, when defining clear benefits in business terms for social media involvement is not generally accepted as understood. You may get some help here from Elizabeth Hair's blog (14th August 2013), The Key to Social Media Measurement, where she defines different tools available across some social media sites and their main attractions. It might be just as well to realise that if any of your clients include people from marketing departments, they will be much more on your side if they know they will get business analytics from the project that will make their lives easier.

So, just how are you demonstrating that your project will meet some key business needs? What promises are you making and are you keeping them?