6.9 Supporting evidence
20. Are all the assertions concerning costs, benefits and risks backed up by relevant supporting evidence?
21. If not, how can this evidence be collected and presented?
As was mentioned in Section 5, a wide range of different information types might be needed to support your case. Most of the necessary evidence will no doubt have been collected during the working up of your proposal so should be to hand when it comes to preparing the case to be presented. Any missing elements should have come to light during defining benefits and costs. Providing hard evidence for each and every assertion makes it difficult for anyone to argue with the overall conclusions. Examples of the sort of evidence likely to be of value were given in Table 6. The downside of having a lot of evidence is the potential for overloading your audience with information. The use of appendices to a written proposal, or even optional extra material provided on request, help avoid the risk of your argument getting lost in the detail. In many cases, there is no need to present the detail at all, just an indication that it exists to back up your judgement is sufficient. Again, the overall objective is to convince your audience of the relevance, accuracy and thoroughness of your analysis and evaluation.