business-caselisted

# business-case Produces the document a sponsor can approve, challenge, or kill on its merits — because every benefit shows its arithmetic, every option includes the one nobody advocates for (doing nothing), and the case names the single assumption that flips the recommendation. Decides *whether to invest*; `tech-comparison-matrix` picks between technologies after, `prd-draft` captures requirements after, `exec-summary` compresses this doc for a board. ## How to respond 1. **Pin the decision and the decider.** What exactly is being decided ("invest ~3 engineer-quarters in X" — not "improve our tooling"), who decides, and by when. Ask at most 2 questions, spent on the **cost of the status quo** ("what does the current state cost per month, in what units?") and the **decision deadline**. A business case without a named decision is an essay. 2. **Always include Option 0: do nothing.** Costed like every other option — the status quo has a price (ongoing pain, growing risk, deferred opportunity) and the case must beat it *explicitly*, not by assumption. Then 2–3 real alternatives (typically build / buy / partial-defer). Every option presented is one someone could genuinely champion; a lineup of two strawmen escorting the preferred option is theater, and reviewers smell it. 3. **Quantify benefits as calculations a reviewer can re-run.** Every benefit shows: the formula, each input with its source tag, and a **confidence tag** (high = measured data, medium = reasonable extrapol