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

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

This forward-looking document enables you to gather together all the elements needed to assess and demonstrate the viability of your project. If well constructed and detailed, it can also serve as a reference during the course of the project, enabling you to monitor its progress towards your objectives.

We'd like to remind you why it's important to draw up an opportunity study, and detail the 8 key steps involved in writing it methodically!

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Why carry out an opportunity study?

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

It should provide its readers with sufficient material 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 realization;
• the opportunities and risks involved;
• financing possibilities;
• 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 those responsible for validating the project (corporate management, finance, IT, etc.). It helps to convince them by proving the merits of the project;
• a reference document for the project manager, who can consult it throughout the project.

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

Who drafts a project opportunity study?

The person responsible for drafting the project study may be :

• the project sponsor, if applicable. This is usually an experienced member of staff who acts as a referee, advisor and intermediary between the project manager and the management committee;
• the project initiator. He/she knows the company or department well enough to be able to argue for the viability of the project;
  
  
• the project manager, if this person has already been designated for a project that 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 specialized subjects requiring more in-depth analysis, such as finance, HR, technical aspects, etc.

How to carry out an opportunity study? The 8 steps

Here's 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 summarize the essence of the project, clearly and convincingly.

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

• the project's raison d'être
• expected results
• deliverables to be produced,
• resources to be mobilized, 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 this 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 section, you give more context to the problem you intend to address through your project.

Answer the question: what? Highlight the opportunity to be seized, taking care not to give superfluous details, but all the elements needed 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 section 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, enables us to deduce :
  • strengths,
  • weaknesses,
  • opportunities,
  • and threats.

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

The analysis of this context provides a set of elements and circumstances that have created the current situation and led to the emergence of the opportunity. It also defines the scope of the project.

4 - Unveil the proposed solutions

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

Demonstrate that you have explored different possibilities and selected the most appropriate one: why is this project you are considering the best option among all the others?

Explain your choice using hypotheses and quantified analyses. As an added bonus, get your audience to project themselves, by revealing the new situation once the project has been carried out.

5 - List the expected gains

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

• financial :
  • increased sales,
  • cost reduction,
  • margin improvement, etc.
• other financial :
  • new market positioning,
  • improved product/service quality,
  • process optimization, etc.

Try to list all the expected gains, adding details where necessary. This part is decisive: 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 your project will require:

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

Exact figures can be provided at a later stage. Make sure you provide the information you need to make an informed decision.

7 - Analyze the risks

Of course, any project can run a certain degree of risk. Outlining the risks you have identified in your opportunity study will also show that you are making a fully informed commitment, and lend 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.

Thanks to a mapping of your ecosystem, the tool provides you with all the elements you need to instantly understand your company's environment and anticipate strategic risks, notably concerning :

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

This enables you to document your analyses and assess the impact of these risks in greater detail .

8 - Conclude the study

Finally, write a short summary in this last section, summing up 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 a project opportunity study

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

To this end, 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, by studying, for example :

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

This approach will enable you to make the most appropriate decision, evaluating each of the opportunities and threats of 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?

Final tips 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 (get to the point, accessible vocabulary, etc.);
• emphasize the benefits of this project;
• emphasize 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! 🚀