The company was a mid-sized industrial group. Two thousand employees. An S/4HANA migration running for fourteen months. On paper, everything was green.
Two reports came into every Steering Committee. Finance reported the financial picture — cashflow on plan, project budget at 87% consumed, capex tracking. IT reported the technical picture — sprint velocity, defect counts, integration test progress.
Both reports were accurate. Neither was wrong.
But the two pictures did not match.
When Finance flagged that 87% of the budget was consumed, IT showed 73% of features delivered. When IT reported a two-sprint slippage on the integration layer, Finance reported the cashflow buffer would still hold for Q4.
Nobody in the room asked the question that mattered — which of these pictures is showing us the actual position of the programme?
Each side defended its own view. The conversation drifted into definitions. Was "consumed budget" the same as "earned value"? Did "sprint velocity" account for rework cycles? Who measured what and how?
These are real questions. They have real answers. But they were the wrong questions for a Steering Committee.
The programme did not fail because the numbers were wrong. It failed because there was no shared logic for reconciling them.
Three months later, an external review found what nobody in the room had been able to see — that the technical slippage was already eating into the financial buffer, and had been for two months. The Steering Committee had simply not had a way to see it.
When two reports tell two different stories, the first question is not which one is right. It is what would have to be true for both to be true at the same time.
That question lives one layer above the dashboard.
When was the last time your Steering Committee asked it?
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C
Helping finance and programme leaders build steering logic that works.