A rationalisation programme assessed 400 applications and identified £8m of savings. Two years later nothing has been saved. Why?

What the interviewer is testing

Whether you know which step of a rationalisation programme actually produces the saving.

Why nothing was saved

Decommissioning never happened. The assessment identified what should be retired; retiring it is separate work, unglamorous, carries risk with no visible reward, and is nobody's priority once the assessment is delivered.

It is also the step that gets cut when a programme runs late, precisely because it is the least visible.

The specific obstacles:

No owner for each retirement. Assessments produce recommendations; retirements need an accountable individual with time allocated.

Unclear dependencies. Nobody is confident nothing still uses it, so it stays running "just in case".

Data retention obligations unresolved — the application must go, the data must be kept for seven years, and nobody built the archive.

Residual access needs for historical enquiries, audits and disputes, with no replacement provided.

Licences not reclaimed, so the largest part of the saving is never realised even where the system is switched off.

What to do now

Fund and staff decommissioning as a delivery programme with its own plan, owners and targets.

Prove non-use by monitoring, not by asking. Instrument the applications and observe.

Switch off temporarily first — a defined window offline, monitored for complaints and errors, with restoration available. This converts a feared irreversible act into a reversible experiment, and it finds forgotten dependencies far more reliably than an inventory review.

Build the archive — data extracted, retained in a queryable form, with a simple search interface — so retention obligations and historical enquiries are met without the application.

Track licence reclamation explicitly, since that is where much of the saving sits.

Report retirements, not assessments, as the programme metric.

What a strong answer adds

Verifying the £8m. Savings figures in these programmes are frequently gross rather than net, omitting the migration cost of moving users to the surviving system and the archive cost. A credible number with a smaller total is more useful than a large one nobody believes.

Common weak answers

Re-running the assessment. Attributing it to a lack of business engagement without addressing the obstacles.