Fund the change finance can audit

Digital transformation fails in the budget meeting more often than it fails in the workshop. The story was approved as ambition. The invoice arrives as a programme with no intermediate proof. A careful CFO is right to slow it down.

Stage the work so each release can be audited. What process is different, for which team, by which date, and which cost should fall or which cycle time should shrink. Put the baseline in the brief before you choose a vendor. A baseline invented after the pilot is a story, not a measure.

Keep the first release inside one value stream: quote to cash, or hire to productive, or ticket to resolution. Do not boil the architecture. The firms that finish are the ones that can point at a Tuesday that now takes fewer hands.

When you write the board brief, leave the adjectives out. Replace “platform for the future” with the process, the owner, the spend by quarter, and the condition under which you will stop. Stopping rules are a sign of a serious sponsor, not a timid one.

If finance cannot see the stage, the stage does not exist.

JA