Cost Accountability Model
The arrangement determining whether teams merely see their costs or are financially charged for them, and the behaviour each produces.
Showback reports each team's spend without moving money. Chargeback bills it to the team's budget.
The difference in behaviour is real. Showback creates awareness and relies on professional motivation; teams respond, but a team under delivery pressure will deprioritise cost work. Chargeback creates genuine incentive, and it also creates genuine friction: teams begin optimising for their own bill rather than for the organisation, hoarding reserved capacity, and arguing about shared cost allocation.
Most organisations should start with showback, because it delivers a large share of the benefit at a fraction of the political cost. The failure mode is not the model but the absence of one: teams that cannot see their spend have no reason to manage it, and central cost mandates without visibility simply relocate the argument.
What makes either work:
Timeliness. Monthly reports arriving three weeks late do not change behaviour. Daily or weekly visibility does.
Comparability — cost per unit of business value rather than absolute spend, so a growing team is not penalised for growing.
A named owner per line, since a report addressed to everyone is addressed to nobody.
An improvement path, so a team told its costs are high can be told what to do about them.