The SAM methodology

Tollgate isn’t a general-purpose project tool with governance features bolted on. It’s the software embodiment of a methodology — the Softwired Above-the-Line Methodology (SAM) — for investment governance above the line. SAM is the fastest way to understand why Tollgate is shaped the way it is. It shows why the app does fewer things than the tools it sits beside, and why it refuses some outright. This page is the why. It doesn’t tell you which button to press.

The question SAM exists to answer

A sponsor signs off a multi-million-pound technology investment and becomes accountable for one question. Is this still going to deliver what we funded it for — and if not, what do we do about it?

The data to answer it exists, scattered across a finance system, a Jira instance, spreadsheets, SharePoint folders and a year-old kickoff deck. The PM becomes the integration layer, reassembling the picture every reporting cycle, and the picture goes stale on the way to the room. Worse, when a committee member asks a follow-up — “what did we decide about that change in Q2? what’s the cumulative budget impact?” — the honest answer is “I’ll have to come back to you on that” and the meeting stalls.

The PPM tools that try to solve this on Jira tend to solve it the same way: more configurability, more dashboards, more fields. The end state does forty things adequately, and the sponsor’s actual question adequately at best. SAM takes the opposite bet — do fewer things, properly, in the sponsor’s own vocabulary, in the tool where the work already lives.

Above the line

SAM operates above the line — at the altitude of the people answerable for the money, not the people delivering the work. Scrum, SAFe and the rest operate below it, and they’re fine there. SAM doesn’t compete with them. It refuses to launder story points, velocity or burndown into governance language. None of those is a yes/no answer to “on track for the payoff?” This is the first and most important idea in SAM, and it has its own page: Above the line.

The seven principles

SAM is, at its core, seven principles. Everything else — the lifecycle, the surfaces, the refusals — follows from them.

1. Above the line. The investment-governance layer, not the delivery-management layer.

2. Recommendations not stipulations. Tollgate guides rather than enforces or nags.

   It surfaces drift, stale data and missing decisions. It doesn’t block you or email you. Two deliberate hard gates exist: the Adoption & Change quartet on business-case submission, and a lessons entry on a not-realised verdict. Adoption is the best predictor of whether an investment lands.

3. Kill with dignity. Every state has a low-shame path to explored, not pursued — here’s why.

   Archived and not-realised records sit elevated in the corporate memory, not buried. Failures teach more than successes.

4. The dashboard is the deck. Tollgate is the presentation surface, not a deck producer.

   (See The dashboard is the deck.)

5. No realised-ROI score. SAM computes the forward target in the financial case.

   The target is NPV (net present value), IRR (internal rate of return) and payback. At realisation SAM holds the sponsor’s prose verdict, not a computed variance against the target. (See Does Tollgate calculate ROI?.)

6. The methodology is the product. Strong defaults backed by practitioner judgement, not configurable everything.

   (See Scaffold, don’t dictate.)

7. A closed surface list. Investment Health, then Business Case, Work Packages, Risks & Opportunities, Decisions, Changes, Close-out and Realisation.

   That list is the whole universe of what a sponsor needs to interrogate an investment. An extra surface would fight the methodology.

The lifecycle: Commit, Run, Realise

The life of an investment under SAM has three acts. Each is the sponsor asking a different version of the same question, and each maps onto two of the six stages Tollgate surfaces.

Act	Stages	The sponsor’s question
Commit	Discovery + Approval	Is this worth funding?
Run	Initiation + Delivery	Is it still worth it?
Realise	Close-out + Benefits Realisation	What did we get, and what next time?

Commit — is this worth funding?

Discovery pressure-tests a hypothesis: is the problem real, the outcome plausible, the return defensible, the adoption cost bearable? The business case sits in an Exploring state with relaxed gates. Candidates that don’t survive are archived with a one-line rationale and stay findable.

In Approval, the PM submits a polished business case with the Adoption & Change quartet set and a sponsor named. It flips to Submitted, and the sponsor reads, then Approves, Returns with notes, or — rarely, with full dignity — Archives. Submissions age visibly on the surfaces the sponsor already opens. Nothing gets emailed.

The beat: we decide whether this is worth funding, in writing, with the memory of every alternative explored preserved against the day someone asks.

Run — is it still worth it?

In Initiation, the morning after approval, the PM lays foundations. They set a coarse work-package structure with owners and baselines, induct the steering committee and seed the Adoption & Change work. They start the risk register and confirm cadence. A visible but non-blocking checklist composes itself from the registers. It recedes after the first steering meeting.

In Delivery — the long stretch where most weeks live — the PM keeps the picture current through the week (a guided review takes minutes). The PM reports confidence on the Outcome and Adoption axes alongside RAG (red/amber/green). Materialised risks become decisions of record. Pending changes surface for a call. At each steering meeting, the projector shows Investment Health and the meeting runs straight off it.

The beat: we govern while it runs and the case file stays current. The sponsor never hears “I’ll have to come back to you on that” in the room.

Realise — what did we get?

In Close-out, the symmetric peer of Approval, the PM prepares an as-built record. It holds what was actually delivered, deltas against the approved case, residual risks resolved, lessons captured and BAU handover confirmed. The approved business case stays immutable. Amendments touch only the record of what actually happened. The project enters the Closed lane — hidden by default, findable.

Benefits Realisation is the lightest-touch stage. The adoption KPI gets one reading — the figure and its source, quoted — and short reviews post on the agreed cadence. The sponsor declares the verdict when ready: Realised, NotRealised or not ready yet. The declaration is the governance act. The prose pair (what we said beside what we got) is the artefact. Not-realised records carry an elevated lessons field, because the next sponsor funding a similar case needs to find them.

The beat: we learn what we got, and the person who signed the cheque writes the verdict. We preserve the failures as carefully as the successes.

What SAM refuses

The refusals are part of the methodology, not gaps in it. SAM will not build ticket-level rollups, capacity or resource planning, or sprint metrics. It will not build a live realised-ROI or variance tracker, configurable approval workflows, email or Slack nags, or a slide-authoring workflow. Each has a home elsewhere, or would drag Tollgate below the line. Saying no — visibly — is what makes the depth possible.

Why an app, not a process

A disciplined PMO (project/programme management office) could operate SAM with a SharePoint site and a calendar invite. Many approximate it, at varying levels of heroism. SAM lives in a Forge app inside Jira for one reason. The methodology needs a single surface where the case file is kept rather than reassembled, inside the tool where the work already lives. The moment governance lives somewhere different from delivery, governance drifts.

Forge satisfies the “Runs on Atlassian” trust constraint — no external data exfiltration, no external AI. And Ask Tollgate runs natively on the same data.

Where to go next

• Above the line — the founding distinction.
• The SAM lifecycle — the six stages and their states, as dry reference.
• Your first investment — see the front half of the lifecycle in action.
• Investment governance, and what it asks that project governance doesn’t — the discipline SAM implements, explained without reference to the product.