Opportunity study: 8 steps to proving your project's raison d'être

Do you have an idea for a project and want to convince your management of its potential and its benefits for the company? Then it's time to start preparing a business case, right from the preliminary project stage.

This forward-looking document will enable you to gather together all the information you need to assess and demonstrate the viability of your project. If it is well constructed and detailed, it can also be used as a reference during the course of the project to monitor progress towards the objectives to be achieved.

Here we remind you of the importance of drawing up a feasibility study, and detail the 8 key steps to drawing it up methodically!

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Why carry out an opportunity study?

As soon as you have an idea for a project, drawing up an opportunity study should be the first thing you do once you have expressed your need. This document will gather all the relevant data to demonstrate the raison d'être of your project.

It should provide its readers with enough material to enable them to assess the opportunities represented by the future project, and therefore its relevance. In particular, it is used to examine :

• whether the need to be met is of strategic interest ;
• the constraints on its realisation;
• the opportunities and risks involved
• financing possibilities
• the expected benefits, etc.

💡 The opportunity study should not be confused with the business plan, which is an action plan presenting the company's development over several years, with supporting arguments and figures, to convince potential investors to support the project financially.

The opportunity report, the deliverable produced following this study, is both :

• a decision-making aid for the people responsible for validating the project (company management, finance, IT, etc.). It helps to convince them by proving the merits of the project;
• a reference document for the project manager, who will be able to consult it throughout the project.

☝️ If the study convinces the decision-makers, it can be taken further with a feasibility study.

Who writes the opportunity study for a project?

The person responsible for drawing up the project study may be :

• the project sponsor, if applicable. This is usually an experienced member of staff who acts as a referee, adviser and intermediary between the project manager and the management committee;
• the project leader who initiated the request. He or she knows the company or its department well enough to be able to argue for the viability of the project;
  
  
• the project manager, if this person has already been appointed for a project which is just waiting for the green light from management to get underway.

☝ Sometimes, the help of an expert may be sought, whether internal or external to the company, on more specialised subjects requiring more in-depth analysis, such as finance, HR, technical issues, etc.

How do you carry out an opportunity study? The 8 steps

Here is a guide on how to write an opportunity study, with each step corresponding to a part of the document.

1 - Write a careful introduction

This introduction, also known as the executive summary, is designed to summarise the essence of the project in a clear and convincing way.

The first page of the document, it should contain key information such as :

• the purpose of the project
• the expected results
• the deliverables to be produced
• resources to be mobilised, etc.

The secret to presenting your analyses in a relevant way ? Provide enough material to give an idea of the project, without going into too much detail. Take care with the summary, and make people want to know more. This can play a positive role in the decision-making process.

2 - Present the opportunity

In this part, you give more context to the problem you plan to address by carrying out your project.

Answer the question: what? Highlight the opportunity to be seized, taking care not to give superfluous details, but all the information you need to understand it.

3 - Describe the context

Provide an analysis of the context in which your project takes place and highlight the issues at stake. This part focuses on the environment in which the company operates, and in particular its market.

There are a number of tools available to help you study this context in depth, such as :

• the Pestel analysis, which allows you to decipher the environment in terms of :
  • political
  • economic
  • social
  • technological
  • environmental
  • and legal.

• the SWOT matrix, which follows on from it, can be used to deduce :
  • strengths
  • weaknesses
  • opportunities
  • and threats.

💡 These tools make it possible to grasp the major issues surrounding the project and to place it within a strategic reflection.

Analysis of this context provides a set of elements and circumstances that have created the current situation and given rise to the opportunity. It also helps to define the scope of the project.

4 - Unveil the solutions envisaged

At this stage, highlight the response you want to provide!

Show that you have explored different possibilities and that you have chosen the most appropriate one: why is the project you are considering the best option of all?

Explain your choice using hypotheses and quantified analyses. As a bonus, encourage your audience to think ahead, by revealing the new situation once the project has been completed.

5 - List the expected benefits

This is where you list all the benefits the company will derive from the project, in terms of :

• financial :
  • increased sales
  • reduced costs
  • improved margins, etc.
• other financial :
  • new market positioning,
  • improved product/service quality
  • process optimisation, etc.

Try to list all the expected gains, adding details where necessary. This part is crucial: it assesses the relevance of the project in terms of its return on investment (ROI).

6 - Detail the resources required

Here you can spell out all the resources that running your project will require:

• financial
• material and technological
• human resources (including key knowledge and skills), etc.

The exact figures can be provided at a later stage. Make sure you provide the information essential to making an informed decision.

7 - Analyse the risks

Of course, any project can run a certain degree of risk. Outlining the risks identified in your opportunity study will also show that you are making a commitment with full knowledge of the facts, and will lend all the more credibility to your approach.

These may be operational constraints (missing skills, absence of a key person, inadequate monitoring of processes, etc.), or linked to the company's environment (societal, economic, environmental, technological issues, etc.).

To make your job easier, a business intelligence platform like Geotrend can help you detect existing risks.

By mapping your ecosystem, this tool gives you all the information you need to instantly understand your company's environment and anticipate strategic risks, including :

• market players and their relationships (competitors, customers, suppliers),
• forecasting market trends
• detection of new innovations, etc.

This means you can document your analyses to assess the impact of these risks more accurately .

8 - Conclude the study

Finally, write a short summary in this last section, summarising the interest of the project while linking the various subjects covered.

This final impression should also be carefully crafted, so that the decision-makers who read it will want to do just one thing: give their go!

Example of an opportunity study for a project

Let's imagine that your ready-to-wear company, which positions itself as an ethical brand, does not yet meet all the conditions to qualify as such. You want to measure the impact that using more fair trade and ecological materials in the manufacture of your clothes could have.

To do this, you will carry out an opportunity study to assess the viability of this project, setting out all the elements you need to consider in a business case. You can compare several possible scenarios, for example by studying :

• different suppliers for your materials (costs, origin, transparency, etc.),
• the percentage of products involved (all your products, a particular range, etc.),
• the target clientele (repositioning required, new marketing personas to be created, etc.).

This approach will enable you to make the most appropriate decision, by evaluating each of the opportunities and threats in your scenarios and opting for the one that best aligns with your company's objectives.

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Ready to turn your opportunities into profits?

One last tip to keep in mind to make the presentation of your opportunity study even clearer:

• pay attention to every detail, both in terms of form (airy layout, etc.) and content (to the point, accessible vocabulary, etc.);
• highlight the benefits of this project;
• emphasise the alignment between your project request and the company's strategic objectives .

You now have all the keys you need to make the right decisions and show precisely why your project deserves to be launched! 🚀