The Value Standard
Kansas Paid $2.8 Million and Plans to Return to the Old System
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.
Read MoreBusiness Cases Budget the Software and Assume the 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.
Read MoreThe C-Suite Can See More of Procurement Now. It Trusts It Less.
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.
Read MoreAustralia’s Munitions Contract Let the Supplier Grade Itself
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.
Read MoreAgree on What a Purchase Must Produce Before You Sign
Writing down what a purchase has to produce settles a disagreement every deal has anyway, and settles it before anyone signs.
Read MoreA Post-Implementation Review That Never Asked If the System Worked
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.
Read MoreA Federal IT Fund Required Savings Estimates but Not Savings
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.
Read MoreWhy AI Success-Story Collections Can’t Prove ROI for You
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.
Read MoreAmtrak Paid for Hours With No Measure of What They Produced
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.
Read MoreAn Australian Audit Found Upgrades Marked Complete but Unverified
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.
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