The cost of doing nothing

Every business case we are shown compares a project against zero. The project costs money. Doing nothing costs, apparently, nothing. That is the single most expensive assumption in enterprise IT.

Doing nothing has a price. It is just never on the slide.

What the baseline actually contains

Start with the obvious: licences, support contracts, the hosting. Those are easy because somebody already invoices you for them.

Then the part nobody adds up. The hours your team spends working around the thing. The month-end process that takes four days because two systems cannot agree on a customer. The integration that gets rebuilt every time the vendor ships a release.

And then the part people find uncomfortable: the person who is the only one who understands it. That is not a cost until they resign, at which point it is the only cost that matters.

Why it gets left out

Because it makes the status quo look expensive, and the status quo usually has an owner, and that owner is usually in the room.

It is much easier to present a project as a cost than to present inaction as one. The first needs a budget. The second needs someone to admit that the last five years were also a decision.

How we price it

Same period as the project. If the modernization runs three years, the baseline runs three years. Same categories on both sides, so the comparison is real rather than rhetorical.

Then we let the number sit there. About one time in five it says do nothing, and we write that down too.