Between shifted and removed costs

Many organisations invest in service transformation with the ultimate aim to reduce costs or improve efficiency. Be it automating manual tasks, streamlining processes, or cutting out steps that seem unnecessary.

However these changes can just move costs or effort to another part of the organisation or onto users, creating new challenges instead of true efficiencies. While removing costs can add value, a simplistic approach actually means you only ever shift the cost. And this leads to unintended consequences, and much worse outcomes.

It’s easy to see a task that takes time and assume removing it will create value. Sometimes, that’s true. Like automating how we test whether a change in code has broken a journey. But in other cases, the cost is not removed—it’s just moved elsewhere. Often, this burden falls on users or other teams.

An example of this I’ve experirenced is a change in packaging. Over Christmas I was in my local shop to look for some nice beer. I found something interesting. But instead of the usual plastic rings or cardboard packaging, the cans were held together with glue.

This likely reduced packaging costs, may have had environmental benefits, and let the product have a clean look. But it also made it more prone to falling apart, and shifted the risk to me as the customer.

I’m sure the team is celebrating cost savings and sustainability improvements. But they achieved this by pushing inconvenience and risk onto me. Recycled cardboard would have worked just fine. Glue, not so much.

I’m not a happy customer when it means your savings cost me more when things go wrong.

Beyond beer, nowhere is cost-shifting more apparent than in healthcare. While there are some tasks that are better done with active patients, many health services now place an excessive burden on patients and their families.

Patients are expected to remember their prescriptions, manage drug interactions, and carry information between appointments and teams. Partial digitisation and service cuts mean that clinicians often don’t have the time or access to the right information, shifting that responsibility to patients instead.

This means that the most unwell often burden the highest cost of gluing together a good health service. And anyone with a chronic illness facing doing that for the rest of their life. Ultimately at the cost of jobs, money and health of those very patients.

You’ve saved a bit in efficiency. But at the cost of the ultimate outcome: the patient’s health and ability to live a good life.

When we design and build products, if we care about our users and the impact of the “improvements” we make, we need to counteract this.

How might we do that

To avoid simply shifting costs rather than removing them, we need to:

• Understand and amplify the voices of those affected and talk with users and teams to identify where burdens are being created.
• Define the problem properly. Doing root cause analysis can reveal alternative ways to remove, rather than shift, burden.
• Model the true end-cost. If removing a task leads to more customer service calls or increased churn, factor that into the cost-benefit analysis.
• Set clear red lines. Principles like “no new burden on the user” or “no added complexity” ensure efficiencies don’t come at the cost of user experience.

Successful product, projects and programmes make informed decisions about what they will and won’t do. A well-designed service should aim to genuinely remove costs rather than just shift them. Without this , efficiency gains can come at the cost of worse experiences for users—and, in some cases, higher costs elsewhere in the system.

Don’t just shift a cost. Remove it.