Your first investment: thesis to gate

This is the tutorial that shows you what Tollgate is for. In one continuous pass you’ll charter an investment: write its thesis, give it a slice of scope, log a risk, set its status, submit the business case for approval, and approve the gate. At the end you’ll have a live, gated investment that you can present — and you’ll have touched five of the six tabs on the way.

We’ll work on a sample project so you can experiment freely. Pick any software or business project you don’t mind filling with practice data, open its Tollgate tab, and follow along. Give yourself about fifteen minutes.

Note

This tutorial keeps you on the happy path — one clean run through, no detours. When you want the why behind a step, follow the links to the explanation pages; when you want every field and rule, follow the links to the reference. Don’t stop to read them now.

1. Write the investment thesis

The Business Case tab is where an investment earns its name. It answers “on track for what?” before anything else can.

1. Open the Business Case tab.
2. Write one clear sentence for each of the three core fields:
   • Business problem — what’s wrong today that justifies spending money.
   • Outcome — what “done and worth it” looks like.
   • Return expected — the payoff you’re funding this for, in your own words. (You’re not entering a calculated number here — see Does Tollgate calculate ROI?.)
3. Name the decision authority — the single sponsor who can approve this investment — and the steering committee who’ll govern it.
4. Save. Your business case is now in Draft.

Tip

Keep each sentence short enough to read aloud in a steering committee. Tollgate rewards a crisp thesis: the sponsor should grasp the investment in three sentences, not three paragraphs.

TODO: confirm with James

Confirm the exact on-screen field labels (Business problem / Outcome / Return expected / Decision authority / Steering committee) and the exact control for saving a draft.

2. Add a work package

A work package is a business-level slice of scope — “Checkout UX overhaul”, “Data migration” — not a Jira ticket. It’s how the sponsor’s view stays above the line.

1. Open the Work Packages tab.
2. Add a work package and give it:
   • a name and a named owner,
   • start and end dates,
   • a budget — baseline, and (optionally for now) forecast and actual.
3. Save it. You now have one unit of scope with a cost and a schedule against it.

You can link a work package to the Jira Epics that deliver it later — see Link a work package to a Jira issue. For your first pass, one un-linked work package is plenty.

3. Log a risk

Governance is partly about being honest about what could go wrong. The Risks tab holds a flat register on the R·I·O model — Risks (downside), Opportunities (upside), and Materialised (something that has actually crystallised).

1. Open the Risks tab.
2. Add a risk with:
   • a title and an owner,
   • an impact score (1–5) and a likelihood score (1–5),
   • a treatment — one of Mitigate, Avoid, Transfer or Accept (the “MATA” set),
   • a short mitigation note.
3. Save. Tollgate sorts the register by impact × likelihood, so your most serious risks float to the top on their own.

Note

Tollgate always says Risk, never “threat”. If you ever handle a risk that comes true, you’ll route it to a decision rather than editing history — see Handle a materialised risk.

4. Set the status

Now tell Tollgate how the investment is going. This is the data that drives the dashboard you’ll present from.

1. Open the Investment Health tab.
2. Set the Overall RAG — the one status colour you set by hand.
3. Record your confidence on the two axes Tollgate tracks alongside RAG: Outcome (will this deliver what we funded it for?) and Adoption (will people actually use it?).

You’ll notice the Cost, Schedule, Scope and Risk RAG cards fill themselves in — you don’t set those. They’re derived deterministically from the work packages, dates and risks you’ve already entered, so they can’t be quietly overridden. Read the Investment Health dashboard explains each card in detail.

5. Submit the business case for approval

Your thesis is drafted, scoped, risked and given a status. Time to put it in front of the sponsor.

1. Go back to the Business Case tab.
2. Complete the BCM (Adoption & Change) quartet — the one place in Tollgate where completeness is genuinely required before you can proceed. It exists because whether people adopt the change is the single best predictor of whether the investment lands.
3. Submit the business case. Its state moves from Draft to Submitted, and a Sponsor Decision Pending card appears at the top of Investment Health.

Note

Only an editor can submit, and — in the next step — only the named sponsor can approve. That separation is deliberate: nobody approves their own case. See Roles, permissions & scopes.

TODO: confirm with James

Confirm the exact labels for the BCM quartet fields and the Submit action, and the exact wording of the “Sponsor Decision Pending” card.

6. Approve the gate

For this tutorial you’ll play the sponsor and approve your own case. (On a real investment this is a different person — that’s the whole point of the separation above.)

1. As the named decision authority, open the Business Case (or the Sponsor Decision Pending card on Investment Health).
2. Review the thesis, the work package, the risk and the status.
3. Approve — optionally adding a one-line rationale. The business case moves to Approved.

That’s the gate. Your investment is now chartered: it has a defined what, a slice of scope, a known risk, a status, and a sponsor’s name on the decision to fund it — all in one place, all current.

Tip

A sponsor doesn’t have to approve. They can return the case with structured notes for you to address, or — with full dignity — archive it as “explored, not pursued”. Those paths are first-class, not failure states. See Return, reopen, or amend a business case.

What you’ve built

In one pass you’ve moved an investment through the front half of the SAM lifecycle — from a hypothesis to a chartered, gated investment. Everything the sponsor needs to interrogate it lives on these six tabs, and none of it is a reassembled deck.

What’s next

• Read the Investment Health dashboard — understand every card on the surface you just filled.
• Present straight from the dashboard — run a steering committee straight off it.
• Curious why it’s shaped this way? Start with The SAM methodology.