Procurement Is Becoming the New IT

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"We finally convinced IT to let us administer the new system ourselves," Jane told me last week.

She's a procurement director at a global manufacturer. After months of negotiations, IT agreed procurement could take direct control of their new sourcing platform.

No more waiting weeks for simple workflow changes… IT would only need to be involved when interfaces with other systems were involved.

Doesn’t that sound wonderful {{FIRST_NAME}}?

"It was supposed to solve everything," she continued. "We'd move at the speed of business, make changes in hours instead of months."

I could hear the "but" coming…

"But now we're drowning. Every user wants custom fields, new approval workflows, integration tweaks. We're getting 30+ requests a week and have no idea how to prioritize them. We're starting to realize we're missing skills to be effective system stewards."

Sound familiar?

Scalable request prioritization isn’t the only skill you need to be successful when taking ownership of your function system but it’s certainly an important one!

I’ll give you a tool to do just that tonight.

Onwards!

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👀 In Case You Missed It…
My Best Linkedin post this week:

25 Procurement Technology demos. All in one place. All free to access.

More procurement teams are taking control of their own SaaS solutions… And for good reason.

When you administer your own procurement technology, you don't have to wait months for IT to make simple configuration changes. Need a new approval workflow? You can build it this week, not next quarter.

You want to add fields to your supplier forms? Done this afternoon.

I hear this value proposition in software vendor pitches all the time!

“The velocity will be intoxicating. FINALLY, procurement will move at the speed of business.”

No so fast… 🛑

As procurement functions become owners of their digitalization, one key challenge keeps revealing itself over and over again: procurement needs to develop skills IT has traditionally owned.

Skills like:

🔴 Improvement request governance
🔴 Software development lifecycle thinking
🔴 End-to-end architecture planning
🔴 Change management processes
🔴 Business process management

Without these capabilities, as procurement takes up new roles and responsibilities traditionally owned by IT, “application spaghetti” starts forming (with a few meatballs to boot!) because procurement doesn't have good IT skills.

When you’re the system administrator, users start asking for all sorts of “improvements” (read: changes 😂)…. All the time…

Custom fields and workflows start multiplying. Processes start breaking apart. Test and production environments start being desynchronized…

Essentially, your software (and the processes it supports) starts to break down…

Goodbye benefits!

As a good new administrator, you decide to start capturing all these requests.

Perhaps is via email and you start capturing these in an Excel file… Perhaps it's through your existing IT ticketing system. However you do it, very quickly you're tasked with 20-30-40-50 improvement requests to try to understand, evaluate and manage.

At that point, just saying "no" to everyone seems like a mountain to climb. 😂

Next thing you know, you’re spending days per month administering this change request log…

So how can you deal with this problem before it overwhelms your team? After all, if you can correctly govern your inputs for application changes, you will limit the risk of the “spaghetti effect” from the start. What’s the answer?

The Lean Business Case.

If you’re just accepting change/improvement requests in free form today, this will change the game.

How?

From now on, whenever someone asks for an improvement/change to the applications you support, you give them a standard form to fill out justifying how this change will provide an ROI to the business (and not just them…).

All of a sudden, the burden is now on the user requesting a change to provide the ROI rationale instead of putting that burden on your digital procurement team.

Three immediate benefits:

You’re a procurement pro so let me put this in language that will resonate…

It’s like creating standardized RFP scoring criteria… But for your application change requests…

A good Lean Business Case template forces the right conversations upfront:

Before anyone can request an application change, you want answers to the following questions:

Simple and effective.

I especially like that last question… The first 4 are to get the user thinking about how the requested change fits into the bigger picture of the business and the impacts.

But the last question asks them if they’ve socialized and “stress tested” their thinking with their teams. By asking them to explicitly list them out, you’re saying:

All of a sudden, they realize they better be pretty serious about defending the change they want…

This may seem a bit much but remember, your digital procurement team’s time is their most valuable commodity!

If they do things right, their work provides exponential benefits for the business (vs. linear benefits in a lot of other roles). You want to make sure these people are spending their time on the most valuable opportunities you have to create value.

If they spend all their time filtering through requests and dealing with stakeholders, you’re not:

These are all very hard things to do that require concentration.

I’ve developed a Lean Business Case Template that codifies the above questions in form format so you can easily triage requests with metadata that captures the answers to the questions above. The last thing you want is having to interpret every request yourself…

If the thinking in this post resonated with you, grab my template for free with the code code BCASE100 at checkout. Your future self will thank you.