Sponsors often bury the amount and the decision under pages of background, and approval then drifts into email threads. This eleven-slide deck puts the ask and the cost on slide two, then sets out the problem, the options weighed, the plan, the budget and the risks. It closes on a decision slide that says what leadership must agree and by when, with detail held back in an appendix.

The sample follows Birchfield Partners asking its board for £240k to replace a manual client onboarding process. It shows a baseline of 22% rework and 140 hours lost a month, three options including doing nothing, a 12% contingency, a 22-month payback and one high risk. Replace the baseline with your own figures and sources, enter your real options, update the cost table with your quotes, and name the approver and the answer date.