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- The Most Expensive Spreadsheet in the Room is the One You Were Trying to Replace
The Most Expensive Spreadsheet in the Room is the One You Were Trying to Replace
Last week I was catching up with an old friend in New York who happens to run a large multinational bank. We promised each other we would not talk about work. That promise did not survive the first drink but I am glad, because what he shared gave me a perspective worth passing on.
He told me they had spent tens of millions on finance automation over the last four years. I asked what had changed. He said: my team still does everything in Excel.
I was not surprised. I have had versions of that same conversation with finance leaders across industries for years. The details change but the frustration does not.
Here is what I have come to believe after sitting across the table from finance leaders navigating these programs for a long time. The technology is almost never the problem. The bots work, the platforms do what they are supposed to do but what fails is the system that surrounds it: the process that was already broken before anyone touched it, the business case built around “saving time” with no baseline to measure against, the handoff where the consultants leave and nobody quite knows what to do when something breaks, and the manager who quietly tells the team they can keep using the old process if they prefer.
I have watched automation projects that looked perfect on go-live day become ghost processes within six months. Not because they failed technically, but because nobody owned them, the exceptions were not identified, and the team never really trusted the design. In finance, trust matters. If the numbers coming out of an automated process cannot be fully explained and audited, people will not rely on them. They will open Excel.
There is also something worth saying about how consulting is often structured around these projects. Go-live is the milestone everyone is working toward. It is when the project gets closed, the slides get made, and the next engagement begins. What happens after, whether people are actually using the tool, whether the error rate dropped, whether the CFO can point to a real number and say we got value there, that rarely sits inside the contract. I do not think that is anyone’s bad intention. But it does mean the hardest part of the work, the adoption, iteration, and measurement, often gets left to teams who were not set up to do it.
That is what we think about a lot at Chazey. We have worked closely enough with finance teams going through this to know that go-live should be the least stressful part of the project. The work that actually determines whether value gets realized happens at the start, when outcomes are defined and difficult questions are addressed. It is similar to building a house: rush the foundation and you’ll have ongoing problems. Spend the time to plan and build your floorplan, mechanicals, and structure, you’ll have a reliable home for the long-term.
The projects I have seen deliver real outcomes share a few things. Someone asked the hard questions before the work started. What exact metric are we improving? Against what baseline? Who owns this the day after go-live? How do we handle the exceptions, because there are always exceptions? When do we stop and measure whether any of this worked? Those questions sound simple. In my experience, when outcomes are disappointing, they were rarely answered well upfront, and that is usually where the value gets lost.
My friend in New York did eventually find his answer, though not through the big program. It came from a smaller, quieter project his team ran on a single reconciliation process, where they defined what good looked like before they started, named an owner, and planned deliberately for what they would do with the capacity once it was freed up. No fanfare, just one full-time hire equivalent saved per year and a team with time to do work that actually needed them.
That is what good automation looks like in practice. Not the demo. Not the go-live. Just a clear answer to a simple question: what are we trying to change, and how will we know when it has worked?
About Chazey Partners
Chazey Partners is a global management consulting firm specializing in operations transformation and shared services. As Agentic AI reshapes how organizations think about work, we bring deep expertise in back-office operations and operating model design to help leaders ask the right questions, and act on the answers. Whether you are at the beginning of your Agentic AI journey or looking to accelerate an initiative already underway, Chazey Partners brings the frameworks, the experience, and the objectivity to ensure you are thinking about it at the right level. To learn more, visit www.chazeypartners.com.
Author
Shaji Farooq
CEO, Chazey Partners
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