Every year, the same ritual: IT needs are submitted, project portfolios swell, and endless review meetings follow… only to end up with a budget that mostly satisfies your CFO and that you know you’ll have to renegotiate with your business units and teams!
The result? Blurred priorities, opaque spending, and teams spending more time justifying their budgets than making them perform.
Our clients broke the cycle. They replaced endless debates with clear rules, political arbitrations with factual criteria, and “safety net” monitoring with a culture of continuous optimization.
What if this year, your IT budget finally served your strategy… instead of complicating it?
Mission 1 – Reduce OPEX without sacrificing ambition
Context
In a context of tight budgets, our client needed to significantly reduce IT spending while pursuing an ambitious digital transformation.
Objectives
Identify optimization levers to cut €5M in OPEX without compromising service quality or key projects.
Challenges
Avoid a purely accounting-driven approach. Budget reductions had to be staged: quick wins on ongoing actions, improvement projects to build, and deeper transformations to impact cost structures meaningfully.
Key success factors
Transparency in IT costs strengthened clarity and legitimacy. Communicating operational consequences of each trade-off (technical debt, slower responsiveness, potential skill loss) helped secure buy-in.
Results
€5M in savings identified, with collective understanding and acceptance of trade-offs.
Mission 2 – Instill a culture of economic performance in IT
Context
Economic performance of IT was diffuse, without structured oversight or shared tools. The IT department aimed to shift from ad-hoc budget tracking to collectively owned performance.
Objectives
Gain control over all expenses and clarify the value they deliver. Empower managers on their budgets and launch a performance plan around identified optimization levers.
Challenges
Creating an economic culture in a historically technical and artisanal environment. Aligning all stakeholders on a shared vision of IT costs.
Key success factors
Managerial teams were trained and empowered, fostering a comprehensive view of expenses and identifying short- and long-term optimization levers. Implementing analytical tools within the CIO office structured the process and anchored it in the budget cycle.
Mission 3 – Regain control of projects to launch
Context
A 1,000-employee IT department faced project overload, making priorities unclear. Each “priority” project replaced the previous one. Economic pressure forced a nearly 50% cut in IT investments.
Objectives
Strict selection of high-impact projects based on value and feasibility. Accelerate delivery by focusing resources on priority projects. Optimize resources, halving capacity without losing business value.
Challenges
Defining and adopting a project methodology required strong sponsorship. Moving from a reactive “request-driven” logic to a selective, value-based approach challenged habits and required building new tools and processes.
Key success factors
A systematic scoring system across four axes—economic value, NPS, risk of not doing, image—clarified project value. Cross-functional decision committees, including executive members, prioritized projects to focus resources where they mattered most. Strengthened PMO roles created a consolidated roadmap, allowing coordinated adjustments instead of isolated project decisions.
Results
Practices gradually embed understanding of business and IT constraints, enabling value-based IT investment decisions. Budget reductions were achieved through informed, value-driven choices.
The real problem isn’t a lack of budget—it’s a lack of method.
If your arbitrations still feel like debating contests…
If your “optimized” OPEX is never challenged…
If budget owners spend without questioning…
…your process is a waste machine, not a management tool.
We’ve helped clients replace endless meetings with decisive actions—and frustration with results.
Want to see how it could work with your budget?
Challenging these processes is easy from the outside… but that’s exactly why you should consider reaching out!
Why not have a quick conversation to turn this budget constraint into a lever for change?
