Define Success Before the Vendor’s Product Defines It for You

← Back · ACT II · Chapter 7: Value Is Not Promised; It Is Proven

A tool arrives with a definition of value already built in. If the buyer has not written one first, the tool’s definition becomes the buyer’s by default.

Read a technology pitch literally and a lot of it is about taking things away: waiting, searching, deciding, effort. Add those up and you arrive somewhere no buyer actually chose. That happens because it came out of a definition nobody argued about, one where fewer steps is always better and value just means tasks done faster.

Where that definition leads matters less than who wrote it. When it ships inside the product, it was written by whoever built the tool, and it is in place before the buyer sees it. If the buyer never approved it, the business is being run on someone else’s idea of good.

Whose Definition the Tool Works Toward

When a seller builds its own idea of what good means into the product, the buyer inherits it without a discussion, and it starts to look like progress. The tool then works hard toward a target the buyer never set. Nobody has to act in bad faith for this to happen. The seller built the product around the results it can show, and nobody on the buyer’s side wrote down a different one.

What a Process Map Cannot See

Take two steps in a process. In one, someone retypes a number that was already correct, which is pure waste. In the other, someone signs off that the number is right and takes responsibility for it. On a process map the two look the same, so a tool built to remove steps will remove both with the same confidence. The map shows that a step exists and says nothing about the judgment inside it. Telling the two apart takes something that says what each step is for, and that is the job of a standard the buyer writes.

A Standard Is Buyer-Governed

The fix is to move the definition of value out of the product and into a standard the buyer owns. That does not mean keeping work slow or distrusting every efficiency. Write the standard before the tool arrives, so the buyer approves what good means instead of finding it already installed, and then hold the vendor’s product to it.

A vendor whose product delivers gets something from this too. With the buyer’s own standard in hand, it knows the target before the work starts, and a result that meets it shows up in the buyer’s record, which is where it counts at renewal.

The same test reaches the supplier’s people, where a capability claim is worth what an outside check is worth.

The same definition has to survive the handoff after the sale, where what was promised and what was delivered get counted two different ways unless the buyer wrote the standard first.

See also Procurement Prices Every Concession and Never Checks the Result, on the concession-pricing apparatus and the verification line it leaves out.

Keep reading: ACT II · Chapter 7: Value Is Not Promised; It Is Proven