Use Case Rationalization

As teams transition from Discovery to Rationalization, it’s essential to pause and ask the right questions. This checkpoint is not just about eliminating weak candidates—it's about validating that each shortlisted use case truly deserves the organization's time, budget, and resources.

DBIM recommends applying the following four-lens evaluation before moving into detailed refinement and solution design. These questions guide cross-functional alignment and help ensure that innovation efforts stay grounded in business priorities.

• Strategic Alignment:

  Does the use case align with our business goals and objectives?

  • Every use case should be mapped back to a clearly articulated business objective—whether it’s improving customer experience, enhancing operational efficiency, driving revenue, or meeting compliance mandates.

  • Teams should ask: Will this initiative contribute meaningfully to our mission and priorities over the next 12–24 months?

• Business Value & ROI:

  Will the solution deliver measurable outcomes and justify the investment?

  • Evaluate the use case based on its potential to move key metrics—like revenue uplift, cost reduction, risk mitigation, or time-to-market improvements.

  • It's not enough to be interesting—it must be impactful. Quantify potential gains wherever possible and consider both short-term wins and long-term scalability.

• Feasibility:

  PRO TIP

  Start with the business pain, not the tech stack.

  Clearly articulate the customer or business problem before jumping into solution mode. This helps avoid scope creep and ensures solution relevance.

  Don’t aim for perfection in the first round. Discovery is iterative. Some gaps are acceptable.

  Do we have the data, tools, talent, and infrastructure to implement this use case effectively?

  • This includes validating technical readiness, integration effort, access to required datasets, and internal capacity (people and skills).

  • Feasibility isn’t just about technology—it’s about delivery confidence. If it requires months of foundational work, it may not be a near-term candidate.

• Risks and Constraints:

  Are there known risks—regulatory, operational, or technical—that could derail execution?

  • Think about data privacy concerns, interdependencies on legacy systems, compliance exposure, or internal resistance to change.

  • Risk doesn't mean disqualification. It means awareness and planning. This is the moment to identify mitigation strategies and flag concerns early.

Once your team gets answers to these key questions, it’s time to shift from qualitative discussion to structured evaluation. This is where Calibo's Use Case Rationalization Template becomes a vital tool.

At this stage, it’s perfectly normal for teams to encounter unknowns. You may not have every detail or perfect clarity on technical feasibility, ROI, or risk factors. That’s okay. The goal of this exercise is not to eliminate all uncertainty, but to surface the most promising use cases and identify where further exploration is needed.

Calibo’s Rationalization Template provides a lightweight but structured format to document and compare use cases across four core dimensions:

• Strategic Fit

• Business Case & Outcome

• Feasibility

• Risks and Constraints

You can include use cases found in the Use Case Bank, new entries created during Discovery, or even variations of existing use cases. The idea is to foster a shared understanding of which use cases are worthy of deeper investment—and which should be set aside or deferred.

Leveraging Calibo’s Use Case Rationalization Template, the Advance Bank team conducted a structured assessment workshop to evaluate their shortlisted use cases from the Discovery phase. Through collaborative discussions and expert input, each use case was mapped against critical dimensions such as strategic alignment, business case strength, feasibility, and associated risks.

This rationalization exercise helped the team filter out non-viable ideas and create a curated, high-potential list of use cases ready for further prioritization. While some use cases showed strong feasibility and alignment, others surfaced regulatory concerns, integration challenges, or value uncertainties.

Now equipped with this rationalized inventory, the team was ready to apply the MoSCoW prioritization model and Use Case Sizing (Calibo’s adaptation of the widely used T-Shirt Sizing method) to further classify these use cases by urgency and implementation effort.

Here’s the curated list:

Use Case Title	Strategic Fit	Business Case	Feasibility	Risks & Constraints
Sentiment Analysis of Customer Product Reviews	High alignment with customer experience goals and digital feedback strategy.	Strong potential to improve product feedback cycles and customer satisfaction.	High Data from app/web and proven NLP tools available.	Data privacy concerns and integration with product dashboards.
Real-Time Fraud Detection using Behavioral Signals	Aligned with financial compliance and risk strategy.	Could significantly reduce fraud and build customer trust.	Medium – Requires integration with transaction systems and ML models.	False positives, data latency, compliance checks required.
Social Media Sentiment Trends	Moderate – Supports marketing and brand sentiment initiatives.	Improves customer engagement and competitive awareness.	High – Feasible using text analysis models and social APIs.	Noise in data, requires constant retraining and moderation.
Credit Scoring Engine using Alternative Data	High – Enables financial inclusion for new borrowers.	Captures new customer segments and improves loan targeting.	Medium – Requires third-party data and new risk models.	Model explainability, bias risks, regulatory validation.
Early Warning System for High-Risk Borrowers	High – Supports proactive credit risk management.	Allows timely interventions and reduces NPA risk.	Medium – Historical behavior and account activity data available.	False alarms, high dependency on behavioral scoring accuracy.
Automated Regulatory Compliance Tracker	High – Aligns with compliance automation goals.	Reduces manual effort and audit preparation time.	High – Feasible with integration to policy and audit data.	Needs continuous updates, high sensitivity to regulation changes.
Audit Trail for CI/CD Deployment	Moderate – Supports IT governance and operational transparency.	Improves traceability and speeds up incident resolution.	High – Logs, deployment metadata already accessible.	Storage overhead and cross-platform traceability complexity.

 

Once the core set of use cases has passed initial strategic evaluation through the Rationalization Template, it's time to refine the pipeline further.

Calibo’s Digital Business Innovation Methodology (DBIM) recommends a two-step decision support model to help teams:

• Eliminate non-starters early, and

• Estimate implementation effort realistically.

To achieve this, we apply two battle-tested frameworks—MoSCoW prioritization and Use Case Sizing (a more formalized version of T-Shirt Sizing).

• MoSCoW helps filter ideas based on urgency and necessity. It separates business-critical use cases from those that are optional or deferrable.

• Use Case Sizing helps you estimate the level of effort and resource commitment required. It accounts for time, people, tools, and complexity.

Together, they help you align impact with feasibility, ensuring you pursue only what is both valuable and executable within your capacity.

Expand the following sections to know more about each framework.

Applying the Logic: Which Use Cases to Proceed With?

Once you've scored and classified use cases based on MoSCoW prioritization (Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, Won’t-Have) and evaluated their implementation complexity (Small, Medium, Complex), you need a structured approach to decide which use cases are worth pursuing further.

The following decision matrix combines these two dimensions—business value (via MoSCoW) and execution effort (via sizing)—to guide whether a use case should be enriched, cautiously advanced, phased, or dropped.

MoSCoW Priority	Use Case Sizing	Recommendation
Must/Should-Have	Small/Medium/Large	Proceed to Enrichment These use cases are critical or highly valuable and should move forward regardless of size. Even if they are large, the impact justifies the investment.
Could-Have	Small/Medium	Proceed with caution These are nice-to-have use cases that may provide marginal benefits. Only proceed if sufficient resources are available and they don’t compromise higher-priority initiatives.
Could/Won’t-Have	Complex	Drop These use cases are low priority and high effort. They pose a risk of wasted time and cost with limited returns. It’s best to archive them for future reconsideration.
Must-Have	Complex	Enrich with a phased plan This combination is high-priority but also high-effort. Instead of rejecting it, break the use case into smaller, manageable phases that can deliver incremental value over time.

In the Rationalization Workshop at Advance Bank, Rajeev Sinha (Portfolio Owner) invited key stakeholders—including Priya (PO), Manisha (Architect), and Vikram (Data Engineer)—to review the top shortlisted use cases using Calibo’s MoSCoW + Use Case Sizing model.

Here's how the team evaluated each use case:

Use Case	MoSCoW Priority	Use Case Size	Recommendation
Sentiment Analysis of Customer Product Reviews	Must-Have	Large	Enrich
Real-Time Fraud Detection using Behavioral Signals	Must-Have	Complex	Enrich with a phased plan
Social Media Sentiment Trends	Could-Have	Medium	Proceed with caution
Early Warning System for High-Risk Borrowers	Must-Have	Large	Enrich
Audit Trail for CI/CD Deployments	Should-Have	Medium	Enrich
Credit Scoring Engine using Alternative Data	Should-Have	Large	Enrich
Automated Regulatory Compliance Tracker	Could-Have	Complex	Drop

 

Outcome: A Curated Set of Prioritized Use Cases

After applying these filters:

• 5 Use cases were marked for enrichment.

• 1 Use case was allowed to proceed with caution.

• 1 Use case was dropped due to complexity and limited near-term value.

This combination of value-driven prioritization and realistic planning gave the team confidence to proceed with a balanced portfolio, maximizing both impact and delivery efficiency.

This checklist acts as both a validation checkpoint and a quality assurance filter for the Rationalization phase. Use it to ensure that each use case has been reviewed for strategic alignment, feasibility, and priority before proceeding to Enrichment. These questions are intended as guidance and can be tailored to suit the specific context of your organization or use case.

Once the checklist items are completed and approvals are in place, the use case is considered ready to move forward in the DBIM journey.

Sl. No.	Item	Status (Y/N/NA)	Comments
1	Strategic alignment with business goals and enterprise priorities	Y
2	Duplicate/redundant ideas identified and resolved	Y
3	Input gathered from business, technical, and compliance stakeholders	Y
4	MoSCoW prioritization applied and reviewed	Y
5	Use Case Sizing (T-shirt sizing) applied	Y
6	Required systems, APIs, or data integrations identified	Y
7	Data availability validated	Y
8	Final rationalization status recorded (Enrich / Drop / Reuse / Park)	Y
9	Handoff to Enrichment phase initiated	Y

After categorizing and scoring use cases based on business impact and feasibility, those that pass the go/no-go decision are ready for the Enrichment phase. This next step transforms abstract ideas into structured blueprints, complete with requirements, personas, and process flows.