Download Feasibility projects are not all alike

Feasibility projects are not all alike
While teaching ENTI 401 — Opportunity Identification in Fall 2019 (at the Haskayne School
of Business, University of Calgary), I had some students ask for feedback of what they could
improve and do better for their final feasibility analysis project (Click here to view some ENTI
401 Feasibility Analysis Projects). What started off as an email reply, quickly turned into an
essay that builds upon my expertise and incorporates material from an unpublished piece
by Alice de Koning, Academic Director of the Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking and
Senior Instructor at Haskayne School of Business who previously taught ENTI 401, and my
own course material from teaching MGMT 3210 — Business Communications at Mount
Royal University. Note this feedback may be applicable to students and working professionals
alike.
Kris Hans lecture slide created based on Kathryn Braun, Kitty O. Locker, and Stephen Kyo
Kaczmarek, Business Communication: Building Critical Skills (Whitby, ON: McGraw-Hill
Ryerson, 2016), 13.
Over time both academically and professionally, you’ll realize feasibility analyses may take
many different forms. Having taught several business communication courses, a primary
model we use is PAIBOC¹ (“payback”):
 Purpose(s)
 Audience
 Information
 Benefits
 Objections
 Context
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You can use PAIBOC to analyze your business communication deliverables (i.e. a feasibility
analysis in our course). The exact requirements of a feasibility analysis depend on the purpose,
audience, and context.
Purpose(s)
 What does the feasibility analysis do to solve the problem?
 What must the feasibility analysis do to meet your needs?
 What do you want your audience to do, think, know, or feel?
Whether major or minor, list all your purposes making note of what questions need to be
answered and what action you’re looking to justify. Ultimately you’re determining what you
want to happen as a result of your deliverable.
Audience
 How is audience going to feel about your feasibility analysis?
 What are the audience’s expectations?
 What do they care about and value?
 What’s in the feasibility analysis that will appeal to them?
 How much does your audience know about your topic?
 How will audience members respond to your feasibility analysis.
Focus on your audience characteristics and expectations to drive how you will communicate
your message. In our course, we convey the feasibility analysis in a variety of communication
mediums from a traditional report, pitchbook, presentation, memo, and financial analysis. This
gives students exposure to different mediums as the selected choice of deliverable will affect
your audience’s response to the feasibility analysis. Over time you’ll discover that different
situations require different approaches and based never assume you know what is required.
Information
 What information must your deliverable include?
List all the points you need to include in your deliverable. If you’re unsure about whether a
particular point or section should be included, consult your teammates, peers, instructor,
manager, etc. Also be sure to examine the information from your audience’s perspective.
Benefits
 What reasons or reader benefits can you use to support your position?
As you’re working through your idea, developing the logic and reasons to support your
concept and argument, think about potential benefits to your intended audience. Consider
identifying at least five benefits to the audience and include those that you can easily and
effectively develop. The reasons and benefits don’t necessarily need to be be restricted to
monetary benefits. Making the user experience easier or more pleasant for the reader to
navigate through your deliverable is also a good reader benefit.
Objections
 What objections can you anticipate your audience to have?
 What are potentially negative elements of your deliverable that you need to deemphasize or overcome?
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

Is there any advantage associated with (even though not caused by) the negative?
Can you rephrase or redefine the negative to make the reader see it differently?
Some negative aspects can only be de-emphasized while others can be overcome. One
approach to include information without emphasizing or drawing attention to it is to
strategically place it in the middle of a paragraph or document, and present it as briefly as
possible.
Context
 How will the context affect the audience’s response?
 Is the industry in which the problem is set doing well?
 Is the government supportive of solutions to the identified problem area?
Think about your audience expectations and consider current events, economic, environmental,
international, political, social, technological, and and any other special circumstances. Use the
real world as much as possible and be as realistic as possible. The context will affect what you
say and how you say it.
In addition, the term “feasibility analysis” can be hidden under different terminology such as:
 Customer discovery
 Due diligence
 Proof of concept
The specific terminology changes based on an individual’s profession, age, location, etc., but
the fundamental idea does not change. The terminology used for the analyses differ in the type
of data, depth of the analysis, and the specific focus, depending on the purpose, audience, and
context.
What does this mean for you whether in this course or generally in life?
Pay attention to detail! Don’t assume an instructor teaching a course will have the same
requirements as a professor teaching another course. Don’t assume a banker and an investor
are looking for the same deliverable as they’re not and are approaching a business venture
from two different perspectives. Never assume.
In our course, we’re exposing you to a broad range of feasibility analyses, the first feasibility
analysis assignment is written as a traditional report with an emphasis on primary research by
focusing in on your identified target market. As such, you should spend time collecting the
primary data and analyzing it for your feasibility analysis. This does not mean a feasibility
analysis project from another course is wrong or done incorrectly and it simply means that it
was completed for a different context. In addition, the learning objectives for the assignment
are focused on particular objectives that may vary from previous assignments. To reemphasize,
pay attention to detail as it affects your reader’s (in this case your instructor’s) evaluation of
the project.
Critical Thinking
As discussed in the first class, you should develop and takeaway three skills from your postsecondary education:
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1. Critical Analysis and Thinking Skills
2. Research Skills
3. Communications Skills
While everyone enjoys creativity thinking and creativity in the workplace is important, critical
thinking is absolutely essential. Critical thinking ensures your deliverable is coherent,
integrated, logical, and realistic that is supported by facts and research. To have a decent level
of critical thinking in a group project, the team must come to an agreement on what exactly the
opportunity is and whether the idea is feasible. While working on the project, the idea and the
group’s assessment of the opportunity’s feasibility will change and evolve and as a result a
risk exists that your group’s ideas will diverge significantly.
While working on a group project, constant communication throughout the process is essential.
My general feedback to students in creating their team charters is to create a work-back
schedule by identifying smaller, more manageable tasks and milestones in order to complete
the project. Dividing the project work among the team is necessary, but you cannot possibly
divide everything up on day one and for this reason we focus on tasks and milestones instead.
The group will update one another on their learning, barriers faced in the process, and
compare and contrast the research findings in order for the analysis to revise the opportunity
idea and overall trajectory of the project. The group will have a difficult time achieving critical
thinking and organizing standards without constant communication and collaboration.
The following are some common critical thinking errors observed in past feasibility analyses:
1. Know
what
question
you’re
answering
Some feasibility analyses appear to be focused on convincing a potential customer
to purchase a product. In others, the analysis has no clear focus or explanation of
why that target market was selected in the first place. In this course, the analysis
and arguments should be focused on whether or not the opportunity idea is
feasible.
2. Unit
of
analysis
Another common error in feasibility analyses is unit of analysis confusion. If the
unit of analysis shifts around too much in the deliverable, the feasibility analysis
results in confusion and incoherence results. There are two reasons for unit of
analysis confusion:
 Unit of analysis confusion could result from poor team communication. As each
team member conducts research, they update their ideas and slowly the initial idea
of the target market morphs into 2 or 3 or 4 different target markets and
motivations. While reading the analysis, the reader can see this mashup of ideas,
but it doesn’t make any logical sense.
 Another confusion is related to the value chain where the opportunity involves
selling a product or service to a customer, but the success of the business idea
relies on whether this product or service created value for their customer. From
my work experience with consulting engagements, I learned to get in the habit of
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distinguishing between the “customer” and the “consumer” and you may find
making this distinction helpful as well.


For example, near the beginning of the semester we had Shawn Abbott speak in
our class and he sits on the board of Top Hat. Top Hat is a higher education cloudbased teaching platform enabling professors to engage students inside and outside
the classroom with compelling content, tools, and activities. In this case, the
“customer” is the university professors who decide to assign the tool (Top Hat),
and the “consumers” are the students taking the courses. By identifying the
motivations of the professors, and how product (Top Hat) creates value for
students, one can demonstrate that the target market (professors) exists. The
professors will want to know the tool will appeal to students and help them learn
more effectively.
Similarly, let’s say we’re proposing digital marketing services to a car dealer
(customer), but they need to know the car buyers (consumers) will be attracted to
and engaged by the services proposed. For example, Pinterest is dominated by
women, so a dealer targeting middle aged men should not bother with a Pinterest
strategy. Understanding the target consumers social media and online behaviour is
essential to creating a service that dealers will actually value. Likewise, furniture
importing for sales to local furniture stores (customers) is a great idea, but the
stores will want to know that furniture shoppers (consumers) are interested in
buying
the
styles
you
will
import.
In summary, the team should make sure what units of analysis are relevant, and
then write up data and analysis in a coherent, consistent way.
3. Critical thinking means doing analysis, not just presenting the data.
For qualitative data, the analysis would include techniques like compare and contrast different
interviews or different sources. Try to find commonalities and differences, with the goal of
being able to summarize key insights. Other analysis methods are defining and organizing key
themes in the data, mapping the 5W1H (who, what, when, where, why, and how), and
summarizing across multiple sources. Quotes are valuable, but should function as examples of
the insights gained through analysis. If you just put the data (e.g. quotes or transcripts) in the
report, you are asking your reader to do the hard work of analysis, and that is usually not a
good
way
to
convince
the
reader
you
have
a
good
idea.
For quantitative analysis, pie charts and averages do not constitute analysis. The basics of
median, mean and distribution are useful information, but the analysis gets interesting when
you can apply basic statistical techniques. For example, cross tabs are a great way to see how
the answers to two different questions interact. Does income or age range correlate with how
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people use social media or buy furniture? In excel, you can do this analysis by using pivot
tables.
Pitchbook
I had a couple of students request I share examples of the pitchbook and financial feasibility
analysis assignments and the following are links to the projects:
 2026 Calgary Olympics: Container Homes Feasibility Analysis
 PowEra Feasibility Analysis
This should give you an example of an “outstanding” or “excellent” submission as they went
above and beyond the requirements. As mentioned above in the “Feasibility projects are not
all alike” section, depending on your purpose, audience, and context of your idea, you will
have to take a different approach for your feasibility analysis submission. Accordingly, please
only use the above projects for reference purposes and as a source of inspiration. On our
Medium.com course publication, I hope to have more projects to share and showcase the
various models and approaches that can be taken for the feasibility analyses.
From a learning objective prospective, the Feasibility Analysis #2 Assignment deliverables are
a “pitchbook” and and “presentation” to expose you to the framework of writer’s logic versus
reader’s logic. This framework is very helpful as it acknowledges that this feasibility analysis
project has two phases:
1. Phase one — The project requires research, thinking, and analysis. In other words,
the project team takes on the perspective of writer’s logic to gather the necessary
materials for the project and write a first draft, mostly to organize the ideas and to
communicate with each other.
2. Phase two — the project requires the team to think about how to communicate the
new knowledge effectively. In other words, the project team takes on the
perspective of the reader’s logic (or listener, in some cases), with the goal of
making sure the audience understands and/or responds to the message. To do the
second phase effectively, the team needs to ensure there is enough time for editing,
to change the order of the paragraphs and the sentences, and to delete the fluff.
You may add headings and sub-headings, and organize some data analysis and
key insights into graphics and tables.
Typically, phase two takes less time than phase one. Unfortunately, in my experience some
students spend too little time for phase two resulting in a lacklustre end deliverable.
Presentation
For the presentation visuals, given you only have ten minutes to present not including Q&A
you will have to adapt and condense your content for your PowerPoint side deck. You may
consider having backup slides after your “summary & call to action” slide. I would
recommend having a “table of contents” for your appendices so you can quickly refer to the
appropriate backup slide and after the question is addressed, go back to the “summary/call to
action” slide.
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Writing
Overall, the writing in most projects was decent, but it could be better. In my business
communications course, throughout the course we emphasize the Seven Cs of Effective
Communication:
Completeness
 All questions answered
 All relevant information
 Five W’s and How
Conciseness
 To the point; planned
 Avoid “old style”/clichés/trite writing
 No redundancy
 Brief, but not abrupt
Concreteness
 Action verbs
 Specific facts/figures
 Concrete/specific words
Clarity
Visual
 Attractive spacing
 Paragraph lengths
 Point form
 Margins & headings
Verbal
 Short/Simple words
 Appropriate sentences or paragraphs
 Emphasis on main ideas
 Coherence & parallel structure
Consideration
 “You” attitude
 Positive language
 Reader benefit
Courtesy
 Tactful & thoughtful
 Inoffensive phrasing
 Sincere & honest
Correctness
 Proper punctuation
 Accurate facts/figures
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
Correct spelling
 Proper grammar
Ultimately your feasibility analysis submissions should consist of a well-articulated
substantive explanation backed by research. In our “Opportunity Identification” course, we’re
drawing upon our logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning to determine feasibility.
If you can capture what I’ve discussed above for your upcoming submissions, you should do
well on the final team projects.
Bibliography
Braun, Kathryn, Kitty O. Locker, and Stephen Kyo. Kaczmarek. Business Communication:
Building Critical Skills. Whitby, Ont., ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2016.
de Koning, Alice. Readings for ENTI 401 — Feedback for Everyone, August 1, 2018.
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