Cost programmes rarely fail in the first year — the first year is when the easy, visible cuts land and the numbers look real. They fail in year two, when the savings that were assumed to be permanent turn out to have been one-time, and the cost quietly creeps back in through the channels nobody was watching.
The pattern is consistent enough to name: a programme cuts headcount but not the work, so the work either gets absorbed by unpaid overtime that eventually breaks, or it gets rehired under a different budget line a year later. The fix isn’t a better tracking spreadsheet — it’s building the programme around the actual cost base, by general-ledger line, so a cut that isn’t real shows up as a variance instead of a surprise eighteen months later.