Make it stick after we leave
Operating model and playbook: capability-centred organisation, governance and the cadence that keeps the savings.
Sound familiar?
The savings programme worked, and a year later the portfolio is growing again. The capability model was built once and never updated. The dashboard nobody owns went stale. Finance and IT drifted back to their own numbers. What was missing was never the analysis; it was the organisation that keeps acting on it.
What we do
We design the operating model around capabilities. Each capability gets an owner, usually a VP, who answers for its cost, its systems and its roadmap. Governance is written down as a playbook: how projects are approved, how reuse is recorded, how renewals are challenged, how retirements are booked. A quarterly cadence reviews each capability's spend against plan. Finance and IT have defined roles in all of it, and the capability model lives in a system, not a spreadsheet, so it stays current.
We also train the people who will run it, including the non-financial managers who have never been asked to own a budget before.
What it has produced
At a global bank, the capability model was built into finance's project approval process, with a VP owner for each of the 525 capabilities, and the governance kept delivering after the engagement ended. Technology cost optimisation at a large global bank →
At a North American utility, standardised processes, training for non-financial and unionised staff, and a contract book the company maintains itself left it running its own budget through a five-year rate filing. IT financial management at a North American utility →
How we'd start
Usually as the last phase of an audit or rationalisation programme, when there are savings to protect. On its own, it begins with a two-week review of how technology decisions are made today, and ends with the playbook, the roles and the first quarterly review run with us in the room.