Follow the Money Patterns

Patterns / Group 4

4 Reframing the Conversation

These patterns leave the money flows where they are but change how the work appears in them. They come from Chapter 16, “Reframing the Tech Conversation”, where Jan, with the help of the financial controller, turns a technical case into a financial one.

The common thread is translation. Engineers argue for their work on its technical merits, while budget holders decide on cost lines, savings, risks, and revenue. These patterns restate technical work in the terms budget holders already use, build the numbers with finance rather than for it, and make sure a claimed saving will still stand up when someone checks it a year later.

Reframing makes a case winnable, but it doesn’t change who pays for shared work. That is the subject of the next group.

Pattern 4.1

The Deletable Cost Line

A saving is only a saving if a budget holder can delete a line, so build your case on cost lines that can be removed.
Pattern 4.2

Speed Needs a Revenue Owner

Only argue that your work makes things faster where somebody owns the revenue that arrives sooner, and cares when it arrives.
Pattern 4.3

Translate the Question

Restate each engineering complaint as a cost, a risk, or a liability that lands on a specific budget holder’s P&L.
Pattern 4.4

Book the Unbooked Liability

Present technical debt and vendor lock-in as liabilities with a cost, in terms finance already uses, such as deferred maintenance.
Pattern 4.5

Co-author the Numbers With Finance

Build your numbers with someone in finance, so that they become finance’s numbers rather than engineering’s advocacy.
Pattern 4.6

Baseline Before You Claim

Before you claim a saving, agree with finance which cost line it will appear on, what the baseline is, and when it will show up.
Pattern 4.7

Read the Numbers Behind the Numbers

Before arguing with a target on technical grounds, work out whose budget it serves and over what period, and what it really measures.
Pattern 4.8

Bridge the Metrics

Draw the lines from what your work improves to what the budget holders are measured on, and build your case along those lines.