Cost-Benefit Analysis Template
Assess pros and cons and improve your informed decision-making.
About the Cost Benefit Analysis template
What is a cost benefit analysis?
Every business decision comes with potential rewards, as well as potential risks. Your decision might expand the business, introduce a new product, or tap into a new supply chain, but it also might cost the organization precious time, money, or social capital. Without a systematic way of analyzing costs and benefits, you may find making decisions an arduous task.
Cost benefit analysis (CBA) is an analytical tool that helps your team assess the pros and cons of moving forward with a business proposal. This technique helps you decide the best course of action to take with a new project by analyzing each option.
When to use a cost benefit analysis
You can use a CBA to compare completed or potential processes, or to estimate the value against the risks of decisions, projects, or processes. Your team can use this powerful, efficient tool in commercial transactions, business decisions, and project investments.
Advantages of using a cost benefit analysis
Organizations make high-stakes choices all the time. Chances are high that your competition is weighing many of the same factors that you are. That’s why it’s crucial to approach decisions in a systematic, methodical way.
A cost benefit analysis allows you to weigh the potential costs of a decision without having to actually incur those costs. It helps your team decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs. If you have no choice but to incur costs, the analysis can provide an estimate for the time it will take to repay those costs.
Perform your own cost benefit analysis
Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share your team’s cost benefit analysis. Get started by selecting this Cost Benefit Analysis Template. Then, follow these steps:
Step 1: Brainstorm costs and benefits. Make a list of each. Try to think of unexpected costs or benefits that your team might not have immediately anticipated. Once you have a list of costs and benefits, think about whether those costs and benefits are likely to change or grow over time.
Step 2: Figure out the monetary value of the costs. Will you need to hire employees? Train them? Will you experience a decrease in productivity while new hires get up to speed? If you introduce a new feature, will your system experience an outage that impacts your customers
Step 3: Now assign a monetary value to the benefits. Do your best to estimate potential revenue, but don’t confine yourself to cash. Think about “soft” benefits like positive word-of-mouth, employee satisfaction, or environmental preservation.
Step 4: Compare your costs and benefits. Which seems greater? How long would it take to repay any costs?
Get started with this template right now. It’s free
Card Sorting
Card sorting is a brainstorming technique typically used by design teams but applicable to any brainstorm or team. The method is designed to facilitate more efficient and creative brainstorms. In a card sorting exercise, you and your team create groups out of content, objects, or ideas. You begin by labeling a deck of cards with information related to the topic of the brainstorm. Working as a group or individuals, you then sort the cards in a way that makes sense to you, then label each group with a short description. Card sorting allows you to form unexpected but meaningful connections between ideas.
Creative Brief
Even creative thinkers (or maybe especially creative thinkers) need clear guidelines to push their ideas in productive, usable directions. And a good creative lays down those guidelines, with information that includes target audience, goals, timeline, and budget, as well as the scope and specifications of the project itself. The foundation of any marketing or advertising campaign, a creative brief is the first step in building websites, videos, ads, banners, and much more. The brief is generally prepared before kicking off a project, and this template will make it easy.
Kubernetes Architecture Diagram
Use the Kubernetes Architecture Diagram template to manage your containerized applications better and bring your apps’ deployment, management, and scalability to the next level. This template helps you lower the downtime in production and allows you to have a more agile app production. Improve the deployment of your apps by visualizing every step of the process with the Kubernetes Architecture template. Try it out, and see if it works for you and your team.
Azure Demand Forecasting
The Azure Demand Forecasting diagram will show the architecture of a demand forecast, making it easier for you to predict data consumption, costs, and forecast results. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, designed to provide cloud-based services such as remote storage, database hosting, and centralized account management. Azure also offers new capabilities like AI and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Gap Analysis
Consider your team’s or organization’s ideal state. Now compare it to your current real-world situation. Want to identify the gaps or obstacles that stand between your present and future? Then you’re ready to run a gap analysis. This easy-to-customize template will let your team align on what obstacles are preventing you from hitting your goals sooner, collaborate on a plan to achieve those goals, and push your organization toward growth and development. You can focus on specific gap analyses — including for skills, candidates, software, processes, vendors, data, and more.
Agile Board
Part of the popular Agile framework, an Agile Board is a visual display that allows you to sync on tasks throughout a production cycle. The Agile Board is typically used in the context of Agile development methods like Kanban and Scrum, but anyone can adopt the tool. Used by software developers and project managers, the Agile Board helps manage workload in a flexible, transparent and iterative way. The Agile template provides an easy way to get started with a premade layout of sticky notes customizable for your tasks and team.