A £900m+ business case across nine government organisations — approved.

Nine central government organisations. More than 40,000 users. A shared-services programme worth more than £900m, which needed HM Treasury Green Book investment approval before a penny could be committed.

A business case at this scale is not a document-writing exercise. Nine organisations meant nine sets of baseline data, nine finance functions with different definitions of the same cost, and nine executive teams whose interests in the outcome did not automatically align.

Before a case could be written, nine organisations had to agree what they were buying. We directed the delivery model assessment that produced that answer, running more than forty stakeholder workshops to get there and ending with a recommendation the Chief Operating Officer could take a decision on.

We directed the business case, the full five-case model: strategic, economic, commercial, financial and management. Options appraisal, financial modelling, and a benefits map built so the savings could be tracked and someone held to them after approval rather than claimed at it.

Most of the difficulty sat in the economic and financial cases: getting nine government organisations to a single, defensible set of numbers that Treasury scrutiny would not unpick.

The scope was finance, HR and procurement across all nine organisations. The case went through internal assurance first, then central government assurance.

Approved.

A business case either clears the room it was written for or it does not.