The OSBR Handbook

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IT Investment Evaluation ​

This policy defines how OSBR decides whether a piece of work is worth doing before we do it, and how we express that judgement to the client. It sits at the front of Planning & Shaping: every proposal is assessed by its return to the client's business — not by how large an order it would be for us — and that assessment is made up front, showing the expected effect and how certain we are of it. Large investments are phased into small, verifiable increments so the client keeps deciding on evidence, rather than a single big return being promised once and then hidden.

It builds on two neighbouring standards. Cost Estimation puts an honest, ranged number on what it costs to do the work; Market Research spends a little to learn whether the thing is worth building at all. This policy sits above both and asks the prior question — for this client's business, does the return justify the spend, and how sure are we? We ground it in named investment-appraisal and value-based delivery practice rather than house intuition, and right-size it for an SME and its clients. Deviations are allowed, but — as everywhere in the handbook — they must be deliberate and justified in the project's design notes.

This is where OSBR's values meet the client's money. Be Nice: we put the client's return ahead of our order size, and recommend the work that serves their business best even when it bills us less. Be Kind: we record the accepted case and its assumptions so the teammate who inherits the project, and the client who signed off, are both protected when a plan has to change. Be Strong: we do the honest thinking up front — stating the effect, its certainty, and what it depends on — instead of dressing work up with an impressive-looking number.

How to read this policy ​

  • Requirement levels follow RFC 2119, as elsewhere in the handbook. MUST / MUST NOT are absolute. SHOULD / SHOULD NOT state a strong default overridable only with a documented reason. MAY marks a free choice.
  • Named practice. Where a rule adopts an industry practice (WSJF, TCO, NPV), the practice is named inline and cited under References. We adopt the criteria of these practices and right-size them for an SME — a two-week job does not carry the appraisal apparatus of a six-figure platform decision.

1. Goal ​

The goal is to ensure that money the client spends with OSBR goes to the work that returns the most to their business, and that the client can see the expected return and its certainty before committing — not discover it afterwards.

Concretely, every proposal OSBR puts to a client must:

  1. State the expected effect — what business outcome the investment is expected to produce (revenue, cost saved, risk reduced, time returned), not just the feature delivered. A feature is a cost; the outcome it enables is the return.
  2. State the certainty — how confident we are in that effect, and what the effect depends on. A likely-small win beats a maybe-huge one we cannot stand behind.
  3. Be ranked by return to the client, not by size to us. The proposal that bills the most hours is not automatically the one we recommend. Usually it is not.
  4. Phase large spend into verifiable increments — each increment delivering value the client can check before funding the next, rather than one lump commitment against one distant promised return.

The point is never to make work look impressive. An honest "this saves roughly two staff-days a month, we're fairly confident, payback in about a year" is worth more than a precise-looking ROI figure nobody can defend.

2. Responsibility ​

  • The proposer (the engineer or lead scoping the work) frames the work as an investment: they name the expected business effect, its certainty, and what it depends on. They own that the case is honest and built around the client's return, not our order size.
  • The reviewer independently sanity-checks the business case before it reaches the client — is the claimed effect real, is the certainty stated fairly, is a cheaper increment being skipped? Business cases are reviewed like estimates and like code; this is the AI code review the Quality Gate requires, applied to the why of the work.
  • The project lead ensures proposals reach the client ranked by client return, that large spend is offered as increments, and that the accepted case and its assumptions land in the meeting record. They own that we do not up-sell scope the client's return does not justify.
  • The whole team feeds realised outcomes back — did the effect actually land? An investment case nobody checks against reality is a sales pitch we keep repeating.

A vendor paid by the hour has a standing incentive to grow scope; Be Nice means we reject that incentive on purpose. Recommending work whose return we could not defend fails Be Nice, and quietly padding scope fails Be Strong — we didn't do the honest thinking.

3. Practices ​

3-1. Evaluate every proposal as an investment, up front ​

  • Before work is committed, a proposal MUST be expressed as an investment case: the expected business effect, the cost to achieve it (see Cost Estimation), and the certainty of the effect.
  • The effect MUST be stated in the client's terms — money made, money saved, risk lowered, time returned — not merely "we will build feature X."
  • Certainty MUST be stated honestly and, like an estimate, as a range or confidence, never a single confident figure. A wide, honest range is worth more than false precision.
  • Where the effect is genuinely unknown, the right first move is often not a full estimate but a cheap experiment — hand off to Market Research to buy down the uncertainty before quoting a large build.

3-2. Rank by return to the client, not size to us ​

  • Proposals MUST be ordered by their return to the client's business, not by revenue to OSBR. When a smaller engagement delivers most of the value, we say so and recommend it.
  • Where value, cost, and urgency can be compared across candidate pieces of work, teams SHOULD use Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF): rank by Cost of Delay ÷ job size, so small high-value work is done first and large low-value work is deferred or dropped. WSJF is a deliberate structural counter to the "big project first" bias.
  • Cost of Delay — what it costs the client per unit time to not have this yet — SHOULD be made explicit when sequencing work. Urgent, cheap, high-value work goes first; it is often not the largest order.
  • We MUST NOT recommend a larger or longer engagement than the client's return justifies. The vendor incentive to up-sell scope is real, and it is named here precisely so that we refuse it.

3-3. Use real appraisal numbers, right-sized ​

Investment appraisal has standard, defensible tools. Use them at a depth that fits the decision — not to impress, but so the client can compare this spend against alternatives on the same footing.

  • Compare cost against benefit over the asset's life, not just build cost. Where it matters, account for Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) — build plus run, maintenance, licences, and eventual replacement — so a cheap-to-build, expensive-to-run option is not sold as cheap.
  • For investments with a return over time, teams SHOULD offer a simple ROI, a payback period (how long until the client is made whole), and, where the horizon is long enough to matter, Net Present Value (NPV) — future returns discounted to today, because money later is worth less than money now.
  • These figures MUST carry their assumptions (discount rate, expected effect size, time horizon) exactly as estimates carry theirs. An NPV with a hidden discount rate is false precision. Right-size the rigour: a two-week job does not need a discounted cash-flow model; a six-figure platform decision does.

3-4. Phase large investments into small verifiable increments ​

Large upfront commitments concentrate risk and let a distant promised return hide behind a big cheque. We break them up.

  • Large investments MUST be phased into increments, each delivering value the client can verify before funding the next. This is incremental funding: release money in stages against demonstrated results, not one lump against one far-off promise.
  • Each increment SHOULD be framed as a real option: the client pays a small amount now to keep the right, but not the obligation, to continue — and can stop, pivot, or expand as evidence arrives. Phasing is what converts an all-or-nothing bet into a series of cheap, revocable decisions.
  • The expected return of each increment MUST be visible, not rolled into an opaque total. Hiding the expected return behind a single large number is exactly what this policy exists to prevent — it denies the client the information they need to stop early.
  • Sequence the increments to attack the riskiest, highest-value part first (this aligns with WSJF in §3-2 and the riskiest-assumption discipline in Market Research), so that if the investment is going to fail, it fails cheaply and early.

3-5. Value-based delivery, not scope delivery ​

  • Success MUST be measured by value delivered to the client's business, not by scope shipped or hours billed. A delivered feature nobody uses is a cost with no return, and we treat it as such.
  • Proposals SHOULD name how the expected effect will be observed after delivery — the signal that will tell us the return actually landed. An investment case with no way to check it later is unfalsifiable.
  • When realised outcomes come back weaker than the case predicted, that is a learning to feed forward into the next proposal (§2, whole-team), not something to bury. Honest post-hoc review is how our investment cases stay trustworthy.

3-6. Record the accepted case in the meeting record ​

  • The accepted investment case — its expected effect, its certainty, its cost basis, its increment plan, and the assumptions each rests on — MUST be captured in the meeting record when agreed with the client, alongside the estimate under Cost Estimation.
  • What is recorded is the agreement and its reasoning, not just a headline number. When an assumption breaks or an increment underperforms, the record is what makes re-planning fair rather than a dispute over memory. This is the Be Kind clause — it protects the teammate who inherits the project and the client who signed off.

4. Anti-patterns ​

  • Order-size ranking — recommending the biggest engagement because it bills the most, not because it returns the most to the client.
  • Scope up-sell — padding a proposal with work the client's return does not justify, because we are paid by the hour.
  • Hidden return — one large commitment against one distant promised payoff, with the per-increment expected return never broken out, so the client cannot stop early.
  • False-precision ROI — a confident single ROI or NPV figure with its discount rate, effect size, and horizon assumptions hidden.
  • Build-cost-only — quoting build cost as the investment while ignoring run, maintenance, and licence cost (TCO).
  • Scope delivered ≠ value delivered — declaring success because features shipped, with no check on whether the business effect landed.

5. Related standards ​

  • Cost Estimation — putting an honest, ranged number on what the work costs; this policy weighs that cost against the client's return.
  • Market Research — spending a little to learn whether the thing is worth building before a large investment case is built on guesses.
  • Development Guide — the Planning & Shaping stage this policy fronts, and the meeting record the accepted case lands in.
  • Quality Gate — the AI code review discipline applied here to the business case, not just the code.

6. References ​

Named investment-appraisal and value-based delivery practice this policy is grounded in.

Investment appraisal

  • ROI / Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) — comparing whole-of-life cost against benefit, not build cost alone.
  • Net Present Value (NPV) & payback period — discounting future returns to present value and measuring time-to-recovery; standard capital-budgeting appraisal.
  • Business-case discipline — expressing proposed work as expected benefit vs. cost with stated assumptions (the case-driven appraisal tradition; the HM Treasury Green Book five-case model is a useful reference point, right-sized for an SME).

Value-based sequencing

  • Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) — rank by Cost of Delay ÷ job size — https://framework.scaledagile.com/wsjf
  • Cost of Delay — Donald Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow — quantifying the cost per unit time of not having a capability yet.

Incremental funding / options

  • Incremental Funding Method (IFM) — funding software in value-delivering increments; Denne & Cleland-Huang, Software by Numbers.
  • Real options thinking — treating each increment as a paid option to continue, pivot, or stop as evidence arrives.

Guarding against the vendor incentive

  • Value-based delivery over scope delivery — measuring success by client outcome, not hours billed — the deliberate counter to the paid-by-the-hour incentive to up-sell scope.