Reuse before you build
Aligning project spend to strategy and to what you already own.
Sound familiar?
Teams build what another team already has, because nobody can see the whole estate. In the portfolios we have worked on, about a third of the technology assets built are decommissioned and written off within two years. The team that builds something reusable pays for all of it; everyone else benefits for free, so nobody builds for reuse. Meanwhile the project portfolio is approved on business cases that never mention what the organisation already owns.
What we do
We put the capability model into the approval process. Before a project is funded, the team shows which capability it serves, what already serves that capability, and why none of it will do. A better new system is approved with a migration and decommissioning plan for the old ones, not instead of one. A monthly intake records reuse and the savings it produced; finance validates them; a dashboard compares business units, which does more for adoption than any mandate.
We also fix the economics. The cost of a shared platform is spread across the years and the units that use it, and the teams that build them are recognised and funded, so building for reuse becomes the rational choice.
What it has produced
At a global bank, adoption of shared solutions across countries rose from 20% to 46%, multiple versions of the Kondor treasury system were consolidated on one platform for $3M of operating cost, and the bank raised its own savings target to a $50M a year stretch goal. Technology cost optimisation at a large global bank →
The capability model behind it is the same one that identifies regrettable spend in an audit. Application rationalisation at a large global bank →
How we'd start
With your current project approval template and the capability model, if you have one; if not, we start with the audit. The capability check goes into the next approval cycle, and the intake and dashboard follow within a quarter.