The cost report says ninety percent of the budget is consumed. The
progress report says the work package is forty percent complete.
Both numbers are correct. Both come out of systems that reconcile.
Neither report mentions the other.
Someone does ask how they fit together. This is the part usually
described wrongly — the question gets asked, in most rooms, by someone
who is paying attention. What follows is a pause, two people
explaining their own figure again, and an agenda that moves on. I have
sat in that pause more often than in the discussion that should have
followed it.
The people reporting are not careless. The project lead answered for
progress. The head of Finance answered for cost. Each delivered the
part they are accountable for. The sentence that connects the two
figures is owed by no function, so nobody says it.
Three things sit underneath, and they stack.
The first is the reporting line. Progress comes from the project lead.
Consumption comes from Finance. Time comes from neither. Three
deliveries, three owners, no owner for the connection.
The second is the reference. Progress and consumption are not measured
against the same object:
• Finance cuts by period and legal entity, because that is what
the statutory accounts require
• the Programme cuts by work package and sprint, because that is
where the effort is actually consumed
Each cut is correct inside its own logic. They do not meet at any
level where a decision could be taken. So the aggregation happens in
the meeting, out loud, from memory.
The third is the baseline, and it carries the other two. Forty percent
complete is only a statement if there is something it is forty percent
of. In most programmes that reference has been replaced several times.
Each replan becomes the new benchmark, and measured against the most
recent plan every programme is roughly on plan. The original
assumption — what this was going to cost, and by when — no longer
exists in binding form. It was never deleted. It was superseded.
That is what makes ninety percent unreadable rather than alarming.
Nobody can say whether ninety consumed for forty delivered is a
problem, because the answer needs a baseline that is gone.
The number that would settle it is in neither report. Forty percent
complete says nothing about when the remaining sixty arrive. A
programme can hold its budget line and lose the year, and both reports
stay green while it happens.
What is your programme forty percent of?
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C / Helping finance and programme leaders build
steering logic that works.