Article Preview
TopIntroduction
The elevated blood pressure is responsible, globally, for 62% of cerebrovascular disease and 49% of ischaemic heart disease (Ha, 2014). The World Health Organization (WHO) strongly recommended to reduce dietary salt intake as one of the top priority actions in order to decrease the number of deaths from hypertension (WHO report 2007) since is one of the leading causes of death worldwide (Alwan, 2011; WHO, 2014). Is well known that salt excessive consumption is one of the most important factors of high blood pressure and increased cardiovascular risk (Cappuccio, 2013). For instance, the hypertension is one of the main causes of excessive consumption of salt (also known by its chemical name, sodio chloride), which is evident by several epidemiological, experimental, and clinical studies which positively correlates with excessive salt consumption (Alawwa et al., 2018). The hypertension, associated with consumption of salt, studied in this paper is one of the commonest chronic diseases (Singh et al., 2016) and is usually accompanied by several other diseases associated, such as hearth and vascular disease, stroke and renal failure (Turner et al., 2008).
A considerable and reliable methodology to measure the salt consumption and reducing it in a certain place is obtained with a comprehensive Business Case. A Business Case provides justification for undertaking a project, programme or portfolio. It evaluates the benefit, cost and risk of alternative options and provides a rationale for the preferred solution (APM, 2019). Business Case is an independent and rigorous evaluation process of an initiative that aims value creation in the organisation through the application of its financial, human and time means, or in other words, a Business Case consists on a decision-making tool to determine whether an investment will create value (BcBok, 2015). Typically, it consists on a well-structured document where it states the investment purpose followed by the business impacts estimation (benefits) and costs in order to determine whether the decision under analysis will be profitable. A Business Case should be free of non-validated assumptions, following a rational and impartial process allowed by the usage of business research methods to validate cause-effect relations between phenomena.
Since the business need may come from different possible origins, either top down, bottom-up, middle management or even triggered from external sources, it is essential that a benefits mind-set is “educated” across the organization’s teams so they clearly understand the value of their innovative contributions and initiative proposals. Once the business needs are identified, the business case becomes helpful on providing insightful data on which solutions proposed will better suit the problem, need or opportunity reported and how much value they will return, maximizing the Return on Investment (ROI), and consequently support top management decisions on knowing what, how and when to invest resources towards maximizing business value. Although, and depending the study purpose it could be applied the Social Return on Investment (SROI) since it´s focused in the social aspect.
In addition to this less responsible practice in many organisations, the validation of truthfulness and accuracy becomes more difficult because the variables and the context are so volatile that when the time to measure the results comes, we either do not measure them or anchor our justification in exogenous conditions in which we are immersed and that it was very difficult to predict any kind of change. It is essential to guarantee that the initial moment of Business Case configuration does not stand on assumptions or emotional expectations, but on estimates obtained through proven and free processes, which can contribute to a successful business implementation.