The one-page business case we ask for before any build

Every engagement we run starts with the same artefact: one page, written by the client sponsor, that says what the system will change and how we will know. It is the cheapest filter we have found for work that will never reach production.

The number.

Not “efficiency” or “insight”. A metric the business already reports, with today’s value and the value that would justify the spend. Loan-file review hours. Claims handled per adjuster. Forecast error in points. If nobody tracks it today, the first piece of work is to start tracking it.

The owner.

One named person who will still own the system a year after launch. Not a steering committee, not the project team. Pilots die in the handoff; naming the owner on page one makes the handoff part of the plan instead of an afterthought.

The stop condition.

What result at the end of the pilot means we stop. Writing it down before the build is the only reliable way we know to keep a sunk-cost project from turning into a permanent one.

The page takes most sponsors an afternoon. Roughly a third of the use cases we see don’t survive it, and that is the point: those are the projects that would have cost a quarter to learn the same thing.