Why Every Organization Needs a Business Case Intake Process — During Planning and Throughout the Year
Annual planning is one of the most important financial and strategic exercises for any organization. It’s when leaders assess priorities, allocate budgets, and shape the roadmap for the coming year. But in the rush to finalize plans, it’s easy to miss a critical step: building a formal project or business case intake process.
An intake process isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s essential for ensuring that every project funded, started, or changed is aligned with business goals, financially sound, and operationally realistic.
And its value doesn’t stop once the annual plan is set.
A strong intake process serves as an ongoing guardrail to manage project portfolios throughout the year — preventing chaos, controlling costs, and ensuring that strategy drives action, not the other way around.
Why an Intake Process Matters During Annual Planning
Without a structured intake process, project selection can easily become reactive, political, or incomplete. Ideas are submitted informally. Decisions are rushed. Budgets are allocated without clear understanding of the value or risks.
A proper intake process brings order to the chaos. It ensures that each project proposed for funding is evaluated on consistent, critical criteria, including:
Strategic fit: How the project supports broader business and technology goals.
Financial impact: What the project will cost — not just upfront, but over time. A solid intake process should consider the long-term and annualized financial impact, including:
Capital vs. operating expense breakdown
Depreciation schedules and accounting treatment
Ongoing support or renewal costs
Expected value realization or cost avoidance over multiple years
Resource needs: Whether internal resources are available to execute the work — or whether the organization needs to identify, hire, or contract external resources to deliver successfully.
Risks and dependencies: Potential issues if the project succeeds — or fails.
By setting a higher standard during the planning phase, leadership can prioritize investments with confidence, ensuring that funding decisions are deliberate, defensible, and aligned.
Why the Intake Process Is Just as Critical Throughout the Year
An intake process should never be viewed as just an annual planning tool. It’s not a once-a-year exercise — it’s a continuous governance function that operates year-round.
The annual planning cycle should serve as a ramp or checkpoint, where all intake tickets created throughout the year are reviewed, prioritized, and considered for budget inclusion. If a project or initiative is captured in the intake system and aligns with next year’s strategy, it can move forward into the planning cycle. If it’s a longer-term effort, it can be flagged as a future fiscal year investment.
But the value of a continuous intake process goes far beyond budgeting:
It ensures that ideas are documented and acknowledged. Even if a project doesn’t get funded, employees know their input was captured and considered — creating a culture of transparency and trust.
It gives leadership a full picture of the organization’s technical debt — not just the work that gets approved, but the work that remains on the table. This visibility is essential for setting expectations, managing risk, and avoiding blame when unresolved issues resurface later.
It helps leaders plan proactively rather than reactively, balancing short-term needs with long-term investments.
It prevents capacity overload by flagging new asks before they’re informally started or quietly funded.
When intake is treated as an ongoing process — not a seasonal activity — organizations create a structured, forward-looking approach to technology investment, employee engagement, and operational accountability.
Execution Readiness: Turning Intake Tickets into Business Case Presentations
Even projects that are approved for funding during the annual cycle typically need one more step before execution:
formal execution approval.
The intake tickets created during the planning cycle become the foundation for business case presentations that validate:
Scope, objectives, and updated assumptions
Financial needs based on actual quotes or estimates
Delivery expectations, risks, and responsible teams
High-level technical decisions and system design, presented in a way that is digestible for executive leadership
This final step ensures that when dollars start being spent, leadership has fresh visibility into what is being delivered — not just what was assumed months ago.
It also creates an auditable trail showing that projects were responsibly vetted both before and at the point of execution — from both a business and technical perspective.
What a Strong Intake Process Should Capture
A strong business case intake form or intake process should go beyond high-level descriptions and force teams to think critically about project readiness.
At a minimum, it should gather:
The risks if the project is not done
Interdependencies with other projects, systems, or processes
Teams that will cross-collaborate and deliver the work
How the project fits into the overall technology roadmap
Quotes, estimates, and points of contact for validation
Delivery dates for any required capital equipment
The name of the team responsible for operating and managing the technology after delivery
Any new headcount or contractor requirements associated with the project
A clear capital vs. expense breakdown and understanding of depreciation or ongoing financial obligations
Project Intake Process Checklist
Use this checklist to strengthen your project intake and business case process:
✅ What are the risks if we do not approve or fund this project?
✅ What other initiatives or systems is this project dependent on?
✅ Which teams will need to collaborate for successful delivery?
✅ How does this project fit into the overall technology and business roadmap?
✅ Are there quotes, estimates, or cost validation documents available?
✅ Who are the technical and business points of contact?
✅ Are there required delivery dates for any major equipment or milestones?
✅ Which team will be responsible for managing and supporting the solution after delivery?
✅ Are new hires or contractors needed to execute or sustain the project?
✅ Have capital vs. expense costs been clearly defined?
✅ Have depreciation, renewal, and long-term costs been accounted for?
✅ Have all assumptions, risks, and success metrics been clearly defined?
Final Thought:
A strong intake process isn’t red tape — it’s strategic protection.
It ensures that project investments are intentional, achievable, and aligned — not just during planning season, but every single day of the year.
Let’s Talk
If your organization lacks a structured intake process — or if you’re struggling to manage IT investments across planning cycles — we can help.
At Practical Management Consulting, we offer a free 45-minute consultation to walk through your current intake and planning process. It’s a straightforward, candid conversation — not a sales pitch. Our goal is to get a working understanding of how things currently operate, identify gaps, and offer initial recommendations for improvement.
Even if you don’t have every detail on hand — or don’t think something is worth mentioning — we know the right questions to ask and can help connect the dots.
Let’s bring structure to your IT financial strategy.
[Contact us to get started.]