A tool is cut from the programme scope. The reason given is cost, and
the reason holds, because a figure was named and a figure was removed.
The decision is minuted. It looks like control.
The work does not disappear. Two weeks later someone builds the
spreadsheet that carries the process instead. It is called an interim
step, and it is usually well made — the person who builds it knows the
process better than the tool would have.
I have seen those interim steps still running years later. Nobody
decided to keep them. Nobody decided anything after the original
decision, which is precisely the point.
What the spreadsheet costs is real and unrecorded. Data gets entered
twice, once where it belongs and once where the process needs it.
Reconciliation becomes a monthly task with a name attached to it.
Around the gap, other teams build their own versions, each one correct
inside its own department, none of them comparable. The saving has a
line, an owner and a date. The workaround has none of those, so it
never meets the decision that produced it.
Underneath sits something simpler than cost discipline.
A cost can only be assessed against an intended outcome. If the
programme has stated what it is supposed to produce, and by when, then
every line item can be tested: does this move us there, and what
happens to the date if it goes. Where that statement is missing, there
is nothing to test against:
• the investment is a number the committee can see
• the effect of removing it is a number nobody has to produce
• the person defending it argues from conviction, not from a
reference everyone shares
In that setup, cutting wins every time. Not because the room is
short-sighted. Because the room is being asked the only question it
has a basis to answer.
This is where saving stops being a financial decision and becomes a
steering problem. A programme without a stated destination cannot
distinguish an expensive investment from an expensive omission. Both
appear as cost. One of them is on the record.
Which of your interim solutions is older than the decision that
created it?
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C / Helping finance and programme leaders build
steering logic that works.