Everything always starts on a white board!
There is a STRONG stigma on what a UX Designer uses for their portfolio and depending on execution, it will reflect poorly for the author.
Suffice it to say, this is my first foray into recreating my portfolio site on Wix and I'm still waiting to reach critical mass on mastery and content before I pull the trigger on buying a year long subscription.
HOWEVER, this is a great segue into the topic of procurement practices for companies and how to stop bleeding millions of dollars on unchecked spending.
What's in this Blog post?
The danger of poor Procurement
What are good Procurement practices?
My experience with Procurement
The danger of poor Procurement
If software purchases aren't rationalized, audited, or given an adoption plan to ensure that it's fully utilized then millions of dollars can be bled from finance.
An example of poor Procurement:
Company ABC purchases a Development Platform called XYZ and it costs $100 per license a month for 1,200 employees. By the first year, nearly a $1.5 million dollars have been incurred and without a vetted adoption plan the first 6 months are still spent in training. If the company isn't aggressive with certification training and scaled adoption, it will continue to bleed money and fall into a sunk cost fallacy dilemma.
What are good Procurement practices?
Good procurement can be broken down to three basic steps and these are the same steps that I will apply to my purchase of Wix:
Procurement - Rationalization and supply chain management
Practice - Tool fundamentals and resource management
Process - Training towards mastery and certification
Procurement - Rationalization, supply and chain management
Procurement is the single most significant area a company or individual can optimize to curb expenditures with immediate impact on budget. Procurement is the first line of defense with three stages:
Rationalization
Supply Chain,
Negotiation.
Rationalization is the first gateway to prevent the example lesson from occurring by asking three critical questions:
What is the benefit?
Is there something comparable for price comparison?
Is there a valid adoption plan that reflects user buy-in?
User buy-in is assumed, but it isn't uncommon for management to decide on an optimization platform that the majority of staff didn't agree on. Without buy-in from staff, it will be viewed as "more work for the sake of work" with no measurable impact on product delivery, and devolve any benefit to a garbage-in-garbage-out tool.
Supply Chain management will look at the details of the vendor contract, payment options, and collaborate with IT and Security to check for compatibility and security risks. At this point, nothing has happened yet, since it is now up to the last gateway for negotiation.
Negotiation is it's own team within procurement that will closely scrutinize the contract, payment options, competitive pricing and maintain an exit strategy to cut or recoup losses if adoption fails. Negotiators want to have as much notice beforehand to review, since rushing a negotiation is never favorable. A strong negotiation team would prefer to bow out than succumb to vendor pressure.
A worst case scenario for the Negotiation team is a "hostage" situation. This is when the company has become data dependent on the vendor's platform, thus making separation too difficult and cost prohibitive.
My experience with Procurement
My role with procurement was on team that was formed to tackle the rampant spending plaguing the company's pocketbooks. The task was broken down into three parts:
Audit existing software vendor contracts
Create a new procurement process
Create an adoption plan
We started by working with the finance team to procure a report with all company expenditures on vendor contracts and then traced it to the requesting manager. In some cases the manager was no longer with the company so the current manager had to rationalize the contract. For my part, I collected the finance excel sheet and formatted it for review and presentation. I then created a new framework to report existing software licenses that was scalable through the company's existing documentation platform.
Then a new procurement process was created and new teams were formed for Rationalization, Supply Chain management and Negotiation. The process itself wasn't a hardship to create, it was the collaboration workshops and training for buy-in that took the longest. For my part, I created the presentations, diagrams and resources to find meeting annotation and evergreen documentation.
Maintaining this new procurement process did not fall under my purview, however managing adoption of new software did. For every application that the UX team had a license for, I created the documentation and training resources around it for onboarding and training purposes. In addition to documentation, I facilitated meetings and worked with vendor representatives to schedule and record training and best practices for updates.
All in all, working in procurement was one of the best new disciplines I had the opportunity to have a part in that had the most direct benefit to the company's budget.
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