Procuring the unknown…
May 22nd 2008JeremyGovernance & Thought Leadership
I’ve been musing (and occasionally ranting) about the procurement process over the last few months and have finally started writing a white paper on the topic. Some of the issues were brought into sharp relief by two conversations yesterday.
On one hand I was talking to a prospective client where he highlighted that one of the questions with DSDM is “How do you procure system development services from a 3rd party when the features / requirements of that system are either not fully understood and / or expected to change”. He then went on to highlight the issue of which party is taking what risks.
This is one of the core tenets of traditional / competitive / confrontational procurement: in theory the procuring party is transferring risk to the supplier. In reality this is not the case as the lawyers and commercial people in the supplier are typically more expert in assessing the risks and making sure that their organisation does not accept more risk than necessary. This is because they deal with the area of expertise in focus all the time, where for the customer it may be the first or infrequent purchase of its type.
I don’t yet have a complete answer for this question and I know this is something the DSDM community is looking at more generally. What we are looking for is a model for collaborative procurement; so meeting one of the key principles of DSDM. By definition, this could be seen to be the polar opposite of traditional procurement.
I then went to meet one of the people that I have asked to quote for re-branding and re-vamping the Kubernetes website. Again by its very nature the output of a branding exercise is unknown at the start, there is likely to be a known process but being definite about how long it will take and how much it will cost is difficult.
What did I do? Lapse straight back into a competitve procurement mindset! It was only on the train home I realised the hypocritical hole I had fallen into.
So today’s task is to work out how to procure my re-brand collaboratively….. or at least to accept my latent hypocrisy!
