The book, extended
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Concepts explained, standards pressure-tested, and market claims answered. The posts follow the book's three acts. ACT I: why the current value system fails. ACT II: how value actually behaves. ACT III: how value is governed into existence. Start with the act that matches your question, jump straight to a topic below, or browse everything. Claims here stay under review; what changes is recorded in The Claims Register. New to the vocabulary? The glossary defines the standard’s terms in one place.
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Kansas paid $2.8 million for 16 deliverables and plans to revert to the system it meant to replace. A Kansas monitoring record and a Michigan audit show what goes missing when the people watching a contract change.
The cost of changing how people work rarely appears in an investment case. Written down as conditions the business agrees to meet, it can be staffed and budgeted before approval and checked at the review afterward.
A survey of 2,648 executives puts cost control back on top as procurement’s primary contribution while confidence in the function fell. Executives can see a cost record; what the purchase produced is missing.
An Australian audit of a munitions contract shows a buyer that wrote supply, capability and cost into the contract and tied the supplier’s profit to the measures easiest to count. The capability measure was self-assessed.
Writing down what a purchase has to produce settles a disagreement every deal has anyway, and settles it before anyone signs.
An Australian agency’s plan called for a post-implementation review. The workshop it held after launch identified four priority actions, each about how projects are run. None concerned what the new system was bought to do.
A federal modernization fund required a savings estimate with every proposal, and repayment did not depend on the savings arriving. Eight years later its administrator and its auditor count the results differently.
Collections of AI success stories are good for ideas, but the numbers in them were almost always written by someone other than the buyer who lived with the result.
An Amtrak audit questioned nearly all the spending on a technology contract over missing paperwork. The contract paid for hours and had no explicit performance measures, so nobody could show what the hours produced.
An Australian audit found a department had marked every upgrade metric complete, yet the auditors could not verify the upgrades. Checking a result takes a buyer’s own handover record and funded upkeep.