Every enterprise investment decision is really two questions wearing one coat. Should we do it? And can we deliver it responsibly? The first is a business question about value and priority. The second is an IT question about scope, cost and risk. In most organisations these questions are asked by different people, at different times, using different information — and that separation is where a great deal of wasted investment begins. The discipline that matters is answering both together, against one shared evidence base, before approval.
Two lenses, one decision
“Should we do it?” is a question about the business lens. What strategic objective does this serve? Which KPI is it meant to move, and by enough to matter? How does it rank against everything else competing for the same attention and budget? These are judgements only the business can make, and they are judgements about value and priority.
“Can we deliver it responsibly?” is a question about the delivery lens. Is the scope clear enough to commit to? What are the budget and capacity implications? What are the risks and dependencies? How confident are we, honestly, that we can deliver what is being described? These are judgements only the people accountable for delivery can make.
Neither question is sufficient on its own. A high-value initiative nobody can deliver is not an opportunity; it is a future failure with a good story attached. A perfectly deliverable initiative that moves no KPI worth moving is a waste of capacity that had better uses. The decision only makes sense when both lenses are applied to the same initiative at the same time.
Value without deliverability is a future failure with a good story attached.
— Dr. Konstantinos Pazalos
The cost of asking them separately
In practice the two questions are usually answered in sequence, by people who never share a room. The business decides something is worth doing and hands it over. IT then discovers what it would actually take and either absorbs an uncomfortable surprise or pushes back after a commitment has already been made and communicated. Both outcomes are bad. The surprise erodes delivery confidence; the late push-back erodes trust between business and IT and makes the next hand-off more defensive, not less.
The deeper problem is that the two sides are reasoning from different information. The business case rests on value assumptions IT never saw; the delivery estimate rests on scope assumptions the business never confirmed. When they finally meet, the disagreement is not really about the project — it is about two incompatible versions of what the project even is. You cannot align on a decision when you are not looking at the same evidence.
One shared evidence base
The alternative is to assemble one evidence base that both lenses read from before the decision is made. The business need, the strategic objective, the intended KPI contribution and the stakeholders on one side; the scope, the effort, the risks, the dependencies and the budget and capacity implications on the other — sized consistently, in one place. When value and deliverability are visible side by side, the approval conversation changes character. It stops being a negotiation between two departments defending separate documents and becomes a shared reading of a common picture.
Consistency is what makes this work at portfolio scale. If every initiative is sized against value, effort and risk on the same basis, then priorities can actually be compared, and you can see which ones deserve management attention and why. Without that consistency, prioritisation collapses into whoever makes the most compelling case in the room, which is not the same thing as whoever has the strongest case.
Aligning before approval, not after
The word that matters most in all of this is “before.” Alignment after approval is not alignment; it is renegotiation, and it is expensive. The whole point of doing this work at the demand stage is that it is still cheap to change your mind — to reshape the scope, to challenge the value, to decide the timing is wrong, or to decline the initiative altogether. Once budget is committed and a team is mobilised, every one of those moves costs an order of magnitude more.
I am not arguing for more governance. I am arguing for better-founded governance — for making the value decision and the delivery decision together, on shared evidence, while it is still early enough for the answer to be “no” without anyone losing face. Organisations that build this habit commit less often, but they commit with far more confidence, and they spend far less of their capacity rescuing decisions that should never have been made. That is what it means to align business value with delivery reality before project approval, rather than discovering the gap between them afterwards.
Key takeaways
- Every approval is two questions: should we do it (value) and can we deliver it (scope, cost, risk).
- Asked separately, the two sides reason from different information and collide after commitment.
- One shared, consistently sized evidence base turns approval from a negotiation into a shared reading.
- Alignment must happen before approval, while “no” is still cheap — after commitment it is just costly renegotiation.