Throwing millions at change? It’s time to measure the £ business return

Cedus Admin
Sep 26, 2025
5 min read

We’ve all seen the playbook: huge sums get invested, the change initiative burns through the money, and when the dust settles there’s a huge loss on the investment. People shrug — “that’s change” — and move on to the next thing.

It’s not good enough. The business is paying and deserves to know the return it’s getting. This paper sets out why that fundamental ingredient — a clear, measurable business return — has gone missing, and how to put it back into the change system. Get a measurable return from change, or don’t spend the money.

Thirty years ago we were better at this. With all the progress in Agile, SaaS tooling, and modern engineering, we’ve lost some basics. The point of change is simple: invest to get a return. Somewhere along the way, that got lost. Money goes in, programmes get busy, IT and vendors complete tasks. But the return? No one has any idea. Ask what we actually banked and you hear: “too hard to track.” It’s a myth. It’s a lost art that’s not that hard, and we need to bring it back.

A very simple test

Take a typical big programme — tens of millions. Ask one question: how much of that time and money is spent defining, managing, & tracking the business return? In a normal business you’d expect ~50% of leadership time and energy to focus on income rather than cost. What percentage is it on your programmes? With many senior teams we talk to on huge programmes, the honest answer is: zero.

This isn’t about reporting or accounting — the business return lens drives fundamental behaviour and decision making: what you choose to do, what you choose not to do, how you prioritise, how much “solution effort” you allow so you don’t blow up the ROI case.

What you’d see (the symptoms)

Woolly strategy that can’t be measured or tracked to completion
OKRs that talk about releases, versions and go-lives — not why we’re doing it or what £ comes back.
The WHAT — costs, tasks, resourcing and time — are tracked, but the WHY — strategy realisation, business outcomes, £ benefits and ROI — are missing.
No realistic, data-led forward-looking projections that go all the way to the end of the investment period
Everyone in the team — business, technology and vendors — is focused on the solution.
Resistance to benefit thinking: “but we’re agile.” Agile is great at team level, but it hasn’t made a dent in the long-term failure rates of organisations realising their business goals

Why it’s happening (the root cause)

The business return lens has gone. Benefits and ROI make it into the business case to get funding, then disappear once the programme gets going, never to be mentioned again
Accountability gap: no one in the team has any expertise or responsibility for managing business return
The business mindset, tools and processes needed to include business return in the change system do not exist. It’s a lost art.
Shiny syndrome — people are naturally drawn to the WHAT (the solution) rather than the WHY, so there needs to be conscious prioritisation of spending time on both.

Impact — why it matters

Think of a “typical” big change: £10m in, promised £20m out (a 2:1 case). Now look at it through two independent lenses.

If you combine Harvard’s view that firms typically only bank 25% of planned value with the +45% cost drift most big programmes see, the business return sits around –65% ROI or 0.65:1.

Take McKinsey–Oxford’s view — ~56% less benefit delivered and +45% budget overrun — and the same case lands near –39% ROI or 0.39:1.

In plain money, for £10m invested you get back between £3.5m–£6.1m. That’s why the benefits lens is non-negotiable.

What to do now (the solution)

This actually isn’t hard. It’s a convenient myth that it is. Filling this gap typically has an ROI of between 20:1 and 30:1, so it should be a no-brainer, and the investment in doing the work is typically funded by diverting from wasteful areas, so in reality it’s free.

Make benefit and ROI realisation someone’s primary job. A commercially minded lead (business-owned, finance-backed) with method, simple tooling, time, and authority to stop low-return work and double down on what pays. Not a side gig.
Bake benefits into how change runs. Make the benefits focus a living, breathing part of the change system — embedded in cadence, ceremonies, and decisions — and build it into the tooling and processes end-to-end (backlog, planning, governance, delivery, banking). Not a bolt-on; the way the machine works.
Make the target business return crystal clear, up front. Define vision, mission, and business outcomes as business outcomes (e.g., “increase customer base by 50%”), not technical tasks. Translate each outcome into pounds and pence for revenue, cost, and ROI — and lock that in from the start.
Communicate the target business return across business and IT. Communicate the commercial picture (not just the technical plan) so both sides think like owners, participate in improving the business, and believe the numbers.
Map the WHY to the WHAT. Tie each benefit/ROI goal directly to the scope, tasks, and backlog that deliver it. Clear line of sight from outcome → work, so every item exists for a reason and can be dropped if it doesn’t move the return.
Create Realistic Long-Term Projections of Cost, Benefit, Time and ROI. Keep a living forecast over the full horizon, updated as you learn — and make governance/reporting track benefits and ROI with the same depth as time, cost and resourcing.
Steer to maximise return on investment. Sort the queue by near-term £/risk, make trade-offs explicitly to lift ROI, and lead with ROI in reporting and governance so decisions foreground benefits/returns alongside time, cost, and resourcing. You don’t fund negative ROI; you back what returns first and track it through.
Track through to realisation, not go-live. The job isn’t done when something ships. You often have to take things out (roles, licences, contracts, old processes) to bank the benefit — see it through.

Close

There are two kinds of leaders in change — both matter. The solution-minded: brilliant at building and shipping, less focused on the return. The business-minded: commercially driven, invests for a clear, measurable return — and holds the line until it’s banked.

Do you see this gap? Is the benefits/ROI lens missing — and worth fixing now? Which are you?

If you’re in the second camp (or want to be), now’s the time. It’s surprisingly easy and cheap to fix. Put the benefits lens back in: fewer projects, more value, money banked.

Cedus are running a series of peer-to-peer round tables for senior leaders to compare notes and discuss practical fixes. If that resonates, join us and contact jake.oconnor@cedus.co.uk to get the session set up.