The Cabinet Office did not produce an overarching business case for the Shared Services Strategy, which has hindered progress. HM Treasury’s guidance to government departments states that a business case should be used to support all major programmes and projects considered by the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office did not follow this guidance and instead produced a “Case for Change” which lacked the requisite level of detail on costs, benefits and risk. The Cabinet Office says it did not produce a full business case as it believed that “time was of the essence” and it did not want to “put the cart before the horse”. That decision has had a knock-on impact on the level of funding received and on the level of buy- in from departments, because the lack of detail made the “Case for Change” less convincing. When reporting on the government’s shared services plans in 2016, we recommended that the Cabinet Office should produce a realistic and complete business case for its plans. The Cabinet Office accepted this recommendation at the time. Recommendation 2: The Cabinet Office should revisit its “Case for Change” and revise it in line with HM Treasury’s Guide to developing the project business case, reporting progress to us in its six-month update. In future, the Cabinet Office should always complete a business case for projects, programmes and strategies of this scale.