Communicating and Influencing Grade 6 Example — 500-Word Statement

SAs head of customer operations for a national training provider, I owned a contract renewal decision. Our case management system was fifteen years old: caseworkers re-keyed data into three systems, errors were rising, and a replacement would cost £2.4 million over five years. The board had rejected two previous technology bids from other departments, partly because the benefits had been oversold and had never materialised, so scepticism about big numbers was high. My director warned me the finance director had already called my proposal a nice-to-have. The decision affected 400 staff across six offices.

TI had to present the business case to the investment board and secure approval in principle, against a chief financial officer who was openly unconvinced and two earlier failures haunting the room.

AI started three weeks before the meeting, not in it. I mapped every board member's priorities from their previous questions, noting who cared about risk, who about staff, and who about reputation. I visited the finance director with a draft and asked him to tear it apart privately; his objections, on benefits timing and support costs, were answered inside the final document before the board ever saw it. I rebuilt the financial model so the benefits were stated three ways, optimistic, expected and cautious, and I asked him which he believed; he chose cautious, so the cautious case became the headline and the decision rested on numbers he had endorsed. Knowing the board remembered the failed bids, I opened the presentation by naming them and listing what I had done differently, which took the heat out of the comparison before anyone else raised it. For the wider board I translated the technical case into a story of one caseworker's day, forty minutes saved from re-keying, and I brought no slides beyond ten, each readable from the back of the room. When the operations director challenged my savings as soft, I agreed the part that was soft, removed it from the model live on a shared screen, and showed the case still cleared the hurdle rate; conceding the point won me the room. I had also briefed two non-executive directors beforehand, at their request, and their questions in the meeting let me land points I would otherwise have had to force. I sent a one-page pre-read three days ahead, because papers that arrive the night before get skimmed, and skimmed papers get challenged. At the close I asked for a specific decision, approval in principle with a stage gate at contract signature, rather than vague support.

RThe board approved the case unanimously on the cautious figures, with the stage gate I proposed. Implementation finished on budget, and after one year the system was saving £610,000 a year against a forecast of £580,000, caseworker re-keying time fell by 35 percent, and the finance director cited the approval process as a model for future investment decisions. Two other departments have since adopted my three-scenario model for their own bids.