Field Note
Everyone Has Ideas. Operations Pays for the Wrong Ones.
The cost of a proposal is estimated by the people who benefit from it, and paid by the people who do not.
An intake process collected around sixty proposals a quarter. Each arrived with a sponsor, a business case, and an estimate. The estimates were prepared by the teams proposing the work.
None of them included the cost of running the result afterwards.
Where the estimate stops
Estimates covered build effort reliably, because build effort was what the proposing team would spend. They stopped at the point where the work changed hands. Support load, exception handling, reconciliation, the extra surface a monitoring team would now have to watch — all of it sat past the edge of the estimate, which meant it also sat past the edge of the decision.
A proposal is cheap precisely up to the point where someone else starts paying for it.
This is not dishonesty. The proposing team estimated what it could see, and nothing in the process ever asked it to see further.
The asymmetry
- Benefits are claimed by the proposer and counted at approval.
- Operating costs are absorbed elsewhere and counted, if at all, much later.
- Nothing in the intake reconciles the two.
Selection under those conditions is not a selection on value. It is a selection on how confidently a case can be argued before its consequences become visible. Operations then spends the following years running whatever cleared the bar.
Filed underPrioritization, Operating Cost, Intake