Twenty years ago we wrote a post on William Hefley’s talk on “Identifying Issues in Sourcing: Informing Development of Best Practices” that was delivered at the 2006 Informs Annual meeting. In it, he presented 15 lessons learned from dealing with client organizations. Fifteen lessons that, apparently, the vast majority of organizations still haven’t learned 20 years later. We’re going to conclude our discussion of Hefley’s initial list to make it clear how little progress Procurement has actually made in the last two decades.

11. Clients typically do not execute communication plans for internal or external audiences.

To be more precise, they typically don’t even bother creating communication plans. For a technology / SaaS purchase, the affected users are told a switchover is coming and when they’ll get training. That’s it. Shock and Awe might work in marketing campaigns, but it just scares the sh!t out of users who spent a considerable amount of effort learning how to use the existing systems, and who have lived through multiple system replacements where none delivered on the promises and just made their lives more difficult.

No thought is put into explaining why, what effort was made to understand their role, how they ensured the new system would not take away any capabilities the users depended on and would only add more useful functionality. No explanation as to how the switchover would take place, what hands-on training would be available, and what support would be available if additional help was needed.

And eve if the vendor outlines a plan, the customer ignores it and assumes the vendor will handle what is needed when the time comes. And then the customer wonders why adoption lags and users do their best to bypass the new process, system, etc.

12. Buy in of management, power brokers, and other key stakeholders is important for any project.

In many departments, including Procurement, once they are assigned the project, they just run with it. Being overworked and under-resourced, the goal is to get it done, but ignoring the stakeholders just makes things more difficult when it comes time to validate the final selection, sign the contract, and/or switch the product/service/solution. They will resist not just because they were’t included in the process, but because they have no reason to believe the product/solution/service is better. A communication plan is essential to getting stakeholders involved in the process.

13. Clients are seriously challenged by internal and external change management.

This is the understatement of the centuries — this century and last century at the very least. The rise of decentralized organizations, the lack of cross-functional knowledge, and the general decline in education and mentorship in general since the Industrial Revolution means that most people in most departments struggle to manage their jobs and basic processes at a decent level of efficiency and effectiveness.

There’s no real understanding of how to do change management — how to plan it, execute it, measure it, correct it, and ensure success. Even though it’s fundamental for successful projects (and yet organizations wonder why so many fail to achieve their goals), it’s necessity is barely acknowledge.

14. Clients need to know skill sets and competencies required to manage services internally and externally.

And most organizational departments, and Procurement in particular, barely know the skills they need to do their jobs. (We recently overviewed 30 necessary Procurement skills that make most of the skills lists and 5 that didn’t.) When it coms to change management, they have no clue — and to make matters worse, most service and technology providers don’t know either. They think process redesign, implementation and integration skills are enough. Not even close.

15. Clients need to retain, develop, and deploy appropriate technology and management skills to manage, oversee, and coordinate with service providers.

And when you think about it, there have been hundreds of solutions for the Sourcing and Procurement of indirect products and direct materials and cookie-cutter solutions, but for decades there was no solution for sourcing strategic consultancy solutions. Since most organizations need embedded process guidance in a modern tool to do anything complex when it comes to process transformation or solution implementation, you can see why things don’t go to well. KMS and Project Management Solutions might be good for capturing the imparted knowledge (which no one will ever look at because they are not integrated into processes) and project plans but that’s not appropriate consultancy selection and management. Not even close.