plan-a-cost-reduction

name	plan-a-cost-reduction
category	money
description	Reduce spend through evidence-based options while protecting critical outcomes and people. Use when a team has a savings target but needs to expose service, control, and displacement effects.

plan-a-cost-reduction

Procedure

1. Confirm target, deadline, cash or accrual basis, scope, authority, and protected outcomes.
2. Reconcile the cost baseline by driver, commitment, owner, user, and avoidability.
3. Identify demand reduction, waste removal, rate change, consolidation, redesign, delay, and stop options.
4. Estimate gross savings, implementation cost, timing, confidence, recurrence, and leakage.
5. Assess effects on service, safety, access, control, workload, revenue, resilience, and affected people.
6. Prefer reversible pilots and structural waste removal before blunt cuts to critical capacity.
7. Build a portfolio with dependencies, owners, milestones, leading indicators, and stop triggers.
8. Track realized net savings and unintended harm against the baseline.

Guardrails

• Do not count deferred invoices, transferred cost, vacancy timing, or unapproved ideas as realized savings.
• Never conceal safety, accessibility, labor, control, or customer harm.
• Use authorized processes for workforce, contract, accounting, and regulatory decisions.

Done

• A savings portfolio reconciles to the baseline and distinguishes gross, net, timed, and realized value
• Each option records outcome impact, dependencies, confidence, owner, and stop trigger
• Review evidence verifies both savings and protected service outcomes