Your sponsors carry business cases that promise millions. Nobody verifies.

Leadership committee. Wednesday, 9 a.m. Three new business cases to sign off on the agenda.

CEO: Before we get into the new files, I want to come back to the CRM. Hugo, €1.8 million in budget last year. You promised us two things at 12 months: €3 million in additional revenue, and +15 points of NPS on customer satisfaction. We're at 14 months. Where do we stand?

Sales Director (Hugo): The project has been live since June. 95% adoption across the teams. Honestly, it's a success.

CEO: I'm not asking about adoption. I'm asking about the €3 million in revenue and the 15 points of NPS.

Sales Director: On the revenue, it's hard to isolate, because we also launched the new offering in March, so the delta is split between the two.

CEO: And the NPS?

Sales Director: We started measuring customers in September. We don't have the consolidated delta yet, but qualitatively, the feedback from the sales team is positive.

Silence.

CFO, relieved: Right, shall we move on to the new files?

CEO, to himself: "€1.8 million signed off. Not a single promise verified—not on the money, not on the customer. And now I've got three new files promising several more millions in gains. And I'm supposed to sign in good faith?"

CEO, out loud: No. We're not moving on to the new files.

Reactions. Glances exchanged around the table.

CEO: Let me rephrase my question. Who in this room can tell me, with the numbers to back it up, how much this project actually earned the company?

A long silence.

CEO: So we have a problem.

1. This scene is already the optimistic version.

You read that scene thinking I was describing a difficult situation. In reality, I just described an aspirational one. Because in the vast majority of organizations, the CEO doesn't even ask the question.

We approve new business cases without ever going back to the old ones. We sign, we deliver, we forget. The post-project review, if it exists at all, is there to celebrate adoption, run an internal keynote, and move on. The question of the promised gains vanishes into the flow of leadership meetings. And the CEO, in my scene, does something almost none of his peers ever do: he goes back.

On a single project, €1.8 million signed off without verification. Across the annual portfolio of a mid-sized company, that's €20 to €30 million of business cases approved every year with no structured mechanism to hold the promises up against reality. Over ten years, several hundred million committed on assumptions nobody ever closed out.

This isn't a hunch. The data all point the same way. The PMI reports that fewer than one organization in ten has a high maturity when it comes to value delivery. Only 31% of organizations make building that capability one of their priorities. And even for the projects identified as key to executing strategy, only 61% actually produce the expected business benefits. Four strategic projects out of ten fail to deliver what they promised. And nobody notices, because nobody measures.

What's troubling is that within the same company, spending is controlled down to the last cent. The finance department challenges every line of vendor cost. The management controller tracks budget commitments week by week. Internal audit combs through expense reports. But the return on the project investment—the very reason the check was signed in the first place—nobody ever checks it again.

Picture a sales director who never found out whether his customers renewed. A CFO who never checked whether his revenue forecasts came true. We'd find it absurd. Yet that's exactly what we do with projects. And the CEO is the system's first accomplice, because he doesn't ask.

2. The scoring debate is a red herring.

Every time an organization wants to "select its projects better," it starts talking about scoring. Prioritization committees, effort/value matrices, weighted evaluation models, complexity points. We pour insane amounts of energy into filtering what gets into the portfolio.

It's the wrong battle.

Not because scoring is useless in itself. But because upstream scoring without downstream tracking is collective fortune-telling. We rate promises on a scale of 1 to 5. And since we never check what actually materialized, we have no way to calibrate our scores. No feedback loop. The following year, we re-sign the same overrated business cases, with the same biases, from the same sponsors who have learned that no one will ever come back to hold them accountable.

The real question isn't how you filter at the entrance. The real question is how the organization learns.

Academic research confirms it. An empirical study by Serra and Kunc, published in the International Journal of Project Management, tested twelve project management practices across 331 practitioners in the UK, the USA and Brazil, to identify the ones with a measurable effect on project success. Out of those twelve practices, only one passes the test in all three countries at once: the post-project verification that actual results match those promised in the business case.

Not defining strategic objectives upfront. Not regular reporting during the project. Not an overarching benefits-management strategy. Not scoring. The only practice that works everywhere is the promise-versus-reality comparison, done after delivery.

Until that one practice is in place, everything else is theater.

3. Two non-negotiable structural conditions.

If you want to install this learning loop in your organization, two conditions have to be met. Neither of them is cosmetic.

The first: the time horizon for the gains to materialize must be stated in the business case itself, not afterward.

It's the classic trap. The sponsor promises €3 million in gains "in due course." When you come back 18 months later to ask where they are, he tells you "ah, but that's a long-term thing, you have to wait." The escape hatch is free because nothing was ever locked in.

So the structural rule is that a business case cannot be signed without an explicit breakdown: how much in gains at 6 months, how much at 12, how much at 24, how much at 36. And each cohort of gains has to be tied to a precise measurement mechanism. "A 5% reduction in sales-team turnover, measured by the gap between the attrition rate in year N and year N-1 within the project's scope"—that's verifiable. "Improved productivity"—that isn't.

That precision is uncomfortable for the sponsor because it puts him on the hook. That's exactly why it's essential. It filters out the bogus business cases right at the framing stage. A sponsor who can't articulate precisely WHEN his gains land and HOW they're measured is a sponsor who doesn't have a serious business case.

The second condition: a Performance team with three profiles, reporting to the CEO or the executive committee. Or to the Transformation function, if one exists and it itself reports to the CEO.

Not to IT. Not to Finance. Not to internal audit.

Three complementary profiles. A finance profile that validates the economic calculation of the gains and their accounting traceability. A data profile that knows how to instrument the measurement, cross-reference the sources, and recognize when a delay has structurally pushed back when the gains materialize. A business profile that challenges the operational reality—one who knows that the productivity of a production line isn't measured in kilometers of API but in cycle hours.

Why report to the CEO or the executive committee and nowhere else? A matter of authority and neutrality. Under IT, it loses its business neutrality and gets seen as judge and jury. Under Finance, it turns into an audit-cop and sponsors reject it or work around it. Under the CEO or the executive committee, it's a governance body with a mandate to verify the promises, recommend stopping or reallocating, and—most important of all—feed a structured body of lessons learned that informs the filter for the next business cases.

Without teeth, the Performance team becomes a PowerPoint graveyard. With teeth—that is, with real power to recommend to the CEO that a project failing to deliver its gains be stopped, or that a budget be reallocated to another program—it becomes the most useful body in the executive committee.

4. What changes once you put this in place.

Three things, in this order.

First, the behavior of sponsors upstream. When a sponsor knows he'll be re-checked at a set horizon, against precise metrics, by a team with authority, he no longer pushes the same business case. He deflates his numbers. He sharpens his assumptions. He starts saying "I'm promising €1.5 million in gains, not €3 million," because he knows the €3 million is indefensible and that he'll be held to account.

Next, the nature of the executive committee changes. It stops being a place where you sign blind and becomes a place where you learn. Every portfolio review now includes, alongside the new business cases, the track record of the old ones. The CEO finally has a real map of his sponsors' performance, and he can price their future promises with confidence.

Finally—and this is the most powerful effect over the long term—the organization gains a filtering capability that grows over time. After three years, the patterns emerge. You know that Sponsor A's business cases keep 80% of their promises, and Sponsor B's keep 30%. You know that type-X projects deliver, on average, 60% of the promised gains, and that you therefore need to apply a reality coefficient to their business cases. Selection becomes calibrated, not arbitrary.

It's the only mechanism that makes an organization smarter, year after year, in the way it spends its millions.

Conclusion

This isn't a process problem. It's a problem of managerial courage.

As long as the CEO won't publicly hold sponsors up against their promises, the organization keeps burning millions on business cases nobody really believes in. We sign, we deliver, we forget, we re-sign. It's comfortable for everyone. It's ruinous for the company.

The CEO who creates this loop accepts something simple and difficult: he accepts that his own decisions will be re-checked. He accepts that his own directors will be confronted with reality. He accepts that the executive committee is no longer a rubber stamp for ambitions, but a place where strategy is learned.

It's uncomfortable. That's exactly why it's rare. And that's exactly why it creates a durable competitive advantage.

Refuse the status quo. Let's talk: bertran@airsaas.io

This article first appeared in my LinkedIn newsletter Il était une fois un CODIR, where every two weeks I share real situations from the executive committee.