💼📊

Budget Day

A $18.4M AI platform business case. Two hours until the Board vote.
The numbers don't say what the deck says they say.

📋 Mission

7:10 AM, Board Day. Solaris Financial Group's Board meets at 9:00 AM to approve — or reject — Project Helix, an $18.4M enterprise AI and data platform the CTO has spent five months building the business case for. The deck promises a 340% three-year ROI and a 14-month payback. Everyone loves the story.

At 7:10 AM, the Head of FP&A sends an email that changes everything: the ROI model excludes integration costs, retraining, legacy-system decommissioning, and a year of run-rate OpEx that was quietly classified as one-time CapEx to keep the headline number under the threshold that requires a second Board reading. Meanwhile, last year's comparable project — Atlas — is running 40% over its original budget, and nobody ever filed a formal variance report on it.

You have until 9:00 AM to agree what actually goes in front of the Board.

The number that explains everything: 1.47×
Figure out what it is. Figure out what it means.

🎭 Your Role Briefing
⏱️ Game Flow
Phase 1: Investigation (20 min) — unlock evidence, run the TCO Reality Check calculator
Phase 2: Pre-Board Huddle (25 min) — ask questions, debate
Phase 3: Vote on what goes to the Board
Phase 4: Reveal what really happened
🎯 Remember
Stay in character during the Huddle.
Figure out what 1.47× means — before the room does.
Every function did roughly what it was designed to do. That's exactly the problem.
🔍 Investigation Phase
Unlock evidence. Find what the headline ROI slide alone won't tell you.
20:00
TIME REMAINING
🧮 TCO Reality Check Calculator — The Number That Explains Everything

📁 Evidence Cards — Click to unlock

Each card reveals a piece of the story. The full picture only emerges when all cards are open.

⚖️ Who Is Most Accountable?

Rank each party. You can update this in the Huddle.

🏛️ Pre-Board Huddle
Every role must speak. Every claim must be backed by a number.
25:00
TIME LEFT
$18.4M
Headline CapEx Ask
340%
Claimed 3-Yr ROI
14 mo
Claimed Payback Period
1.47×
TCO Inflation Multiplier (hidden until calculated)
Every box above is a real, verifiable fact. None of them, alone, tells you whether Helix is a great investment or a governance failure waiting to be discovered by the Board. That's what the Huddle is for.

Cross-Examination Questions

0/10 addressed
🗳️ Cast Your Vote
The Huddle must decide what goes to the Board at 9:00 AM.

📊 Live Class Vote (simulated)

Cast your vote first to unlock the reveal.

💼
PROJECT HELIX
$18.4M headline ask · TCO Inflation Multiplier 1.47× · scoping choice made 14 months earlier

The Speed vs. Financial Discipline Debate — Resolved

CTO's Claim
We need to move fast to capture the market window; the business case was built to get us a decision, not to be a fully audited forecast
Measured: speed to Board decision. Full TCO discipline: not treated as a gating requirement.
Head of FP&A's Claim
This was a knowable TCO gap — the scoping choices that created it were made fourteen months ago and never revisited
Measured: cost completeness. Compensating disclosure: never attached.
The actual answer: Both were completely true, at the same time — and neither, alone, explains the credibility gap.

The market opportunity was real. The urgency to decide was real. The TCO gap was also entirely knowable — every excluded cost category (integration, retraining, decommissioning, run-rate OpEx) was known to exist fourteen months before Board Day.

The failure was not the decision to move fast. It was presenting a CapEx sticker price as if it were a complete cost forecast, with no disclosure of what had been excluded and why. Speed and financial discipline are not inherently opposed — a business case can be built quickly and still disclose its own scope limitations.

This is exactly what a disciplined TCO framework — not just a CapEx approval threshold — is built to prevent.

Fourteen months before Budget Day, the initial Helix scoping exercise identified the full cost picture: CapEx, integration, retraining, legacy decommissioning, and Year-1 run-rate OpEx. Fully loaded, that number crossed the threshold that would have required a second, more detailed Board reading.

So the business case was scoped down to just the CapEx component — not dishonestly, exactly, but without disclosure. No one meeting minuted the decision to exclude those categories. No one flagged that the exclusion changed the approval pathway. Nobody's name was recorded as accountable for eventually reconciling the full number.

Building a business case around what fits under an approval threshold, rather than what the investment actually costs, is not business-case discipline. It is threshold management — dressed up in the language of a Board pre-read.

If that scoping decision had been disclosed at the time — even as a single footnote flagging the excluded categories and their rough size — Budget Day's 7:10 AM crisis was, on the balance of the evidence, preventable.

The 5-Step Check Every Business Case Should Pass:
1. Does the TCO include integration, retraining, and decommissioning costs — not just headline CapEx?
2. Are OpEx and CapEx classified per accounting policy, not per what keeps the ask under an approval threshold?
3. Are revenue and growth assumptions stress-tested against a downside case, not just the base case used in the deck?
4. Is there a benchmark against the last comparable project's actual variance — not just its original budget?
5. Is there a named owner accountable for tracking actual vs. projected ROI after launch, not just for winning the approval?
A business case is not a forecast. It's a commitment device.
Scoping it to fit a threshold doesn't shrink the cost — it just delays who discovers it.
📖 Faculty Debrief
Discussion questions, answer keys, course connections.

🧮 TCO Lab — Live Calculations

Play Again with a Different Role

The CFO's experience of Budget Day is very different from the Business Unit Sponsor's.