The Case Nobody Re-Tests: Why Programmes Outlive Their Reasons
A business case is argued hard, approved once, and never looked at again. The assumptions underneath it keep moving — and almost no organisation has a mechanism for asking whether the thing it funded two years ago is still worth finishing.
Most organisations review their programmes constantly. Steering groups, assurance reviews, stage gates, health checks.
Almost none of it asks the only question that matters after approval, which is whether the thing is still worth doing.
What Assurance Actually Looks At
Open any independent review and the headings are familiar. Plan quality, resource profile, risk management, governance arrangements, benefits tracking, supplier performance.
Every one of those asks whether the programme is being run properly — a reasonable question, and one the answers are often useful on.
But a programme can be run impeccably and still be the wrong programme. Nothing in a standard review is designed to notice that.
There is a reason for the omission. Assurance is usually commissioned by the people accountable for delivery — and a review recommending cancellation is an uncomfortable thing to have paid for.
The Premise Has a Shelf Life
Think about what a case rests on. A competitor position, a regulatory date, a volume forecast, an assumed cost of capital, a technology that was expensive at the time.
Two years on, several of those have moved. The competitor did something else, the deadline shifted, the volumes did not materialise, the capability that justified the build is now included in something already paid for.
None of that triggers anything. The case lives in a file from the approval — and the programme carries on executing a plan built on a world that has moved underneath it.
The longer the programme, the worse this gets. A three-year transformation is a three-year bet on assumptions that were only ever good for about twelve months.
Continuing Is the Default
The reason is structural rather than personal, and it is worth being fair about.
A sponsor who stops a programme has spent money and delivered nothing. A sponsor who continues has a plan, a team and a date, and can describe progress in any forum. One of those positions is considerably more comfortable than the other.
So programmes do not usually get stopped. They get slowed, re-scoped, deferred and quietly absorbed — which costs more than stopping and looks like a great deal less.
An organisation that cannot stop a programme has no way of telling a good one from a bad one.
Re-Approval, Not Review
The change that would make the difference is small and procedural — at fixed points, put a programme through re-approval rather than review.
The question is not whether it is on track. It is whether, arriving today with everything now known, it would be funded again. Four things get re-tested:
- which assumptions in the original case still hold
- the cost to complete, not the cost already spent
- the benefit now expected, with the people who will have to deliver it in the room
- what else the remaining money could buy
That last one is the one that changes answers, because it turns an isolated judgement into a comparison.
What Has Been Spent Is Not an Argument
Everyone knows this and almost nobody acts on it. Money already committed cannot be recovered by any decision taken now.
Yet it is argued in meetings every week, usually as a sum. Eleven million spent, so we may as well finish it.
The honest version is harder to say aloud. Eleven million is gone whatever happens next, and the only live question is whether the next four million is well spent — which is a question about the future, not a defence of the past.
Make Stopping Survivable
None of this works if stopping ends a career. Teams read that quickly, and they are not wrong to.
So the organisations that manage it treat a stop as a decision rather than a failure. What was built gets harvested, the people move onto something that matters — and somebody states publicly why it was stopped and what was learned.
Do that once, visibly, and the next sponsor in that position has a route that is not simply carrying on.
A good programme survives re-approval easily. It is usually the sponsor of a good programme who is most willing to ask for one.
The question for the coming year is not which programmes are behind. It is which ones would be approved today — and whether anyone intends to find out.