The initiate and evaluate stage is traditionally understood as the hard prescription ‘to prepare and approve a business case’. A board or other approving authority needs to appreciate that the current practice often treats this process as a formal hurdle to be passed and that 70 per cent of approved business cases are predisposed to fail because they do not address the right governance issues (KPMG 2005).

What needs to be asked at the time of approval is 'What are the expected business benefits?' It must be determined at the outset whether there has been a thorough consideration of how a project contributes to a strategic objective and whether it contributes directly to an objective or whether it contributes to a program of projects which collectively contribute to one or more strategic objectives for an organisation. The approving authority should be very conscious of the tendency to write into a business case whatever words it takes to get funding without any real intention of delivering against the business case. They should be making the subjective assessment of whether the project sponsor genuinely believes in the objectives of the business case and has the passion to drive through the organisational changes needed to realise the promised benefits.

Related to this first question is the evaluation of risk. The greatest risk of any project is that it will fail to deliver the promised benefits (80-90 per cent likelihood of failure) so the key question should be 'How much organisational change is required to realise the benefits?' An approving authority needs to ensure this issue has been thoroughly considered and make the subjective assessment of whether their organisation has the will to make the changes needed to realise the benefits. There are also other risk considerations that should be part of the evaluation (e.g. economic feasibility, technical/operational feasibility, resourcing feasibility, etc), but these questions are really details to help answer the overall issue of how much risk is involved.