Project data lives in one system. Financial data lives in another. Both are correct. Neither can answer the question the board asks, which is whether the programme is worth continuing.
So somewhere between the two, a file exists. Usually a spreadsheet. It pulls from both sides, applies a set of rules, and produces the number that actually gets discussed.
That file is not a failure of governance. It is the only place in the organisation where the translation between the two worlds is actually performed. Someone built it because the question had to be answered and nothing else could answer it. It is, in the most literal sense, the steering logic.
The trouble is where it sits. The rules inside it are the interesting part, how a percentage of completion becomes a cost position, what counts as committed, when a change request enters the baseline. Those rules were decided by one person, over time, mostly under time pressure. They are not written down anywhere, because the file is the writing down.
Three things follow, and they are the reason this matters more than it looks.
The rules cannot be challenged, because they are not visible as rules. They appear as a number.
The rules cannot be audited, because reconstructing them means reconstructing the file.
And the person who owns them has no authority to have made them. They were made by whoever was available, which means the most consequential definitions in your programme reporting were set without a decision.
The instinct is to eliminate the file, usually by buying something. That rarely works, because the file is not the problem. The absent decision it substitutes for is the problem, and a new system will need the same decision, made explicitly, before it can do anything useful.
The cheaper move is to take the file seriously. Ask the person who maintains it to write down the six or seven rules it applies. Not the formulas, the rules. Then look at the list and ask which of them you would have decided differently, had anyone asked you.
That list is usually short, and it is usually the first honest description of how your programme is actually being steered.
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C · Helping finance and programme leaders build steering logic that works.