The contract was signed in March. We were shown the platform in May, told the go-live was September, and asked to confirm that integration would not be a problem. By then the commercial terms were fixed, the executive sponsor had announced it internally, and the only acceptable answer to any question we raised was a plan for working around it. We spent the following two years building and maintaining the compensating layer that made a decision taken in a sales meeting behave like something we could operate.
The technical problems were the predictable ones. The integration surface was a nightly file export rather than the real-time interface implied in the demonstration. There was no sandbox environment, so every test was against production data with a support ticket attached. The identity model could not represent our organisational structure, which meant a synchronisation job of our own, which meant a new thing that could be out of date and wrong. None of this was hidden by the vendor. It simply was never asked, because the people evaluating the product were assessing features against a requirements list and had no reason to ask about export formats or test environments.
What I have stopped doing is treating this as a story about procurement being wrong. They were solving a real problem with the information they had, on a timeline that was also real. The failure was structural: the evaluation had no stage at which anyone who would have to run the thing was asked what running it would cost. Our own process guaranteed that the operational bill arrived after the decision was irreversible.
So I asked for something narrow rather than a seat at every table. One page, before signature, from the team who will operate it: how does data get in and out, what happens when it is unavailable, how do we test a change, how do users get accounts, and what does leaving look like. Five questions, no veto attached. Most vendors answer them easily, and the ones who cannot are telling you something important very early.
Nobody in the business is trying to hand IT an unworkable system. They are simply asking a different set of questions, and by the time our questions get asked, the answers no longer change anything.
– Serguey Shinder
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