Cost-benefit analysis is the exercise of evaluating a planned action by determining what net value it will have for the company. Basically, a cost-benefit analysis finds, quantifies, and adds all the positive factors. These are the benefits. Then it identifies, quantifies, and subtracts all the negatives, the costs. The difference between the two indicates whether the planned action is advisable. The real key to doing a successful cost-benefit analysis is making sure to include all the costs and all the benefits and properly quantify them. It is the fundamental assessment behind virtually every business decision, due to the simple fact that business managers do not want to spend money unless the benefits that derive from the expenditure are expected to exceed the costs. As companies increasingly seek to cut costs and improve productivity, cost-benefit analysis has become a valuable tool for evaluating a wide range of business opportunities, such as major purchases, organizational changes, and expansions.

Business Analysts, Project Managers, Project Directors, Project Team Leaders, Product Managers, IT Project Directors, Sr. Managers, and other team members involved in the following areas: process management, business analysis, strategy and more

Key benefits of attending include:

A formal understating of the key principles of cost-benefit analysis

Methods for quantifying costs and benefits

Expertise in dealing with risk and uncertainty

A practical example of building a simple cost benefit model

Importance of  policy-makers and link to Impact Assessment

Importance of regulated utilities and infrastructure investment

Defining the baseline

Identifying costs and benefits

Transfers and distributional impacts

Using market prices to value impacts

Taking account of inflation and relative price changes

Discounting

How to discount future impacts

What discount rate to use

The importance of thinking about risk and uncertainty

Scenario and sensitivity analysis

Monte Carlo analysis

Real options

Challenges in quantifying costs and benefits

Methods of collecting data and analysing impacts

Stakeholder engagement

Market research

Behavioural experiments

Statistical analysis

Case studies

Modelling

Assessing the additionality of impacts

Adjusting for optimism bias

Why non-market impacts are important

Techniques for valuing non-market impacts

Using existing valuations

Stated preference

Revealed preference

Examples of how to value non-market impacts

Time savings

Carbon impacts

Other environmental impacts (e.g. noise, amenity)

Health impacts