It almost never has anything to do with the math. The variables that decide approval are set at intake, sometimes months before the deck is built.
After auditing more than twenty BRM portfolios and sitting through more business case reviews than I can count, I can predict which cases will be approved within five minutes of opening the deck. Not every time. Most of the time.
This sounds unfair. It isn’t. The math in most business cases is competent. The methodology is broadly sound. The numbers are not the variable. Three other variables are, and they are visible in the structure of the case before anyone has done arithmetic.
Variable one. Whether the case is framed as a problem statement or as a solution. Cases that lead with the problem the business is facing get heard. Cases that lead with the technology investment being proposed get filed under “IT request.” Same content, sometimes the same dollar amount. The framing decides whether the room treats the case as a business question or as a vendor pitch. I have watched more than one technically excellent case die because page one started with a platform name.
Variable two. Whether the value categorization is clean. Most cases that die in committee mix value lanes without realizing it. Time-avoided gets blended with cost-avoided gets blended with revenue-influenced, sometimes in the same paragraph. The committee cannot react to a number that is three things at once, because each lane has a different defender, a different shelf life, and a different bar for evidence. When the lanes are mixed, the entire number becomes contestable, and the easiest move for any committee member is to defer. Cases that lead with a single lane, with the others as secondary benefits in prose, survive at roughly twice the rate.
Variable three. Whether the sponsor is in the room as the sponsor, or as a polite endorser. This one is the most predictive of all. A sponsor who walks into a case review prepared to defend the number has typically done two things before the meeting. They have agreed to put the number into their own forecast. And they have rehearsed their answer to the question “what happens if we don’t fund this?” If they haven’t done both, they will smile, support the case warmly, and let it die when the questioning starts.
These three variables have almost nothing to do with math. They are all decisions made at intake, sometimes weeks or months before the case is presented. By the time the deck is being built, the prediction is already mostly determined.
This is why the Quantified Impact Framework is structured around intake, not output. The 7-field schema forces each variable into the open before the case has a number attached. What is the problem statement, in business language? Which value lane, with the others noted but not counted? Who is the committed owner, and what is their forecast adjustment? The schema is not a reporting template. It is a pre-mortem for the committee meeting that hasn’t happened yet.
Most BRMs build the case at the end of the work, in the week before the funding decision. By then, the variables that decide approval are already set. The case can be sharpened. The structural problems cannot.
The teams I have watched move from 40% case approval rates to 75%+ all did the same thing. They moved their quantification practice to the intake stage. They built the schema before the work, not after. They had the sponsor commitment conversation in week one, not week thirty. They wrote the counterfactual paragraph before they had a solution to propose.
The committee meeting is the easy part once the intake is done. The intake discipline is what Quantify Your Impact is built around. The book lays out the schema, the conversations, and the pre-mortem practice in the order they need to happen.
Most BRMs are working hard on the wrong end of the case. The book is for anyone ready to work on the right end.