You can't talk to me like that - FinTech Futures: Fintech news

You can’t talk to me like that

Written by Leda Glyptis
7th November 2024

I am determined to make this column the only place that doesn’t talk about the US election this week. So instead, I will talk about procurement and vendor management. Aren’t we having fun?

When you deal with procurement, pain seems to be guaranteed

But first, let me tell you a story.

About 20+ years ago, when the world was a more innocent place and networked computers a luxury, a friend walked into the PhD computer room where a bunch of poorly-nurtured postgrad students were typing away on school computers (as the idea of carrying your laptop everywhere you went was as insane as the idea that you would have anything other than super-expensive dial-up broadband at home).

Those were the days when we coveted the ethernet cables snaking behind the laptops of our lucky colleagues living in university accommodation and when the height of proactive safety for your bank account was refreshing your security questions every few months.

So, on that day, my friend walked into the room with the face that we all knew too well: the ‘it’s not going well’ face. The writing, the research. The thing. It’s not coming together. It’s very common for PhD students, by the way. That is mostly how it feels until it doesn’t.

And as she plonked herself down on a rickety chair, she launched into a description of all the ways in which her day of research had gone wrong. So very wrong. In fact, the day had been a washout. The only highlight had been the fact that her bank had asked her to go in to reset her security questions for phone banking.

“Can I choose any question I like?” she asked. “Absolutely,” said the bank employee, not knowing what they were getting themselves into.

So, long story short, from that day forward, when my friend called the bank, and they took her through security, the baffled call centre operator had to ask her, “Where do you think you are going, dressed like that, young lady?”, to which the correct reply was, “You can’t talk to me like that, you are not my real daddy.”

Why am I telling you this, other than it’s a hilarious story and shows creativity I need to double down on when choosing passwords and security questions myself?

I am telling you because I think of this exchange every time I deal with the procurement team of any organisation. When you deal with procurement, pain seems to be guaranteed. And it tends to take the form of unnecessary and largely inexplicable delays and surprise process requirements nobody told you about at the start of said process.

At some point during a procurement process of onboarding a new vendor (that vendor may be you, so it’s existential, or it may be a vendor critical for a project you have spent the last year getting approved, signed off and funded, so it’s pretty existential too)… at some point during that process… the process will change.

A curveball will be thrown at you.

Someone will send you back to square one and tell you there is a whole host of systems and steps and processes that you had no way of knowing about but somehow were expected to magically know about and your ask needs to restart. Which means your project will be delayed, if you are inside the organisation. Or the vendor will be expected to work until it is resolved. Or you won’t get paid for another six months. Or all of the above.

Chances are this will happen more than once in the process.

Chances are when you ask, “Why is this happening?”, “Why is it different to last time we did it?”, or “Why was this not communicated earlier in the process?”, you won’t get an answer.

Like. At all.

There is no silence like the stonewalling you get from a procurement team when you ask them to explain why a process was not communicated, oh, I don’t know, six weeks ago when we started this… or when you ask what the rest of the process ahead is.

Every time that has happened to me over the years… and let me tell you… that’s a lot of times… I think of my friend and her password.

You can’t talk to me like that, you are not my real daddy. That’s what I want to say to the procurement folks. I don’t. But I want to.

You cannot treat me like I am a nuisance. Because chances are I am either a colleague, relying on you to do your job so I can do mine. Or I am a vendor, already selected by your colleagues through a competitive process, relying on you to enable me to get started with the work your colleagues need. Or I am a vendor who’s already done the work for your colleagues and now needs you to go through your internal steps to get me paid. In any and all of those scenarios, I am not a nuisance.

And yet, in my opinion, that’s the treatment. Towards vendors and colleagues alike.

And, while we are at it, do you know what else I am not? A clairvoyant.

Hands up if you are a vendor who signed all their paperwork, was onboarded onto the procurement systems, submitted the paperwork needed to get a PO in order to submit an invoice (in triplicate) only to be told the third time they chased the invoice that there is an additional system they should have been onboarded on so nothing has been processed.

Hands up if you have asked “Why didn’t you tell me this three months ago?” and got nothing but silence back.

Hands up if, next time it happens, you won’t be thinking ‘you can’t talk to me like that, you are not my real daddy’.

Dealing with procurement is a necessary evil. It’s a step we all know we must take and, usually, take a deep breath before we engage.

Because if it’s your own procurement team, you know you will go through the rigmarole of ‘where do you think you are going, dressed like that, young lady?’ And if it’s not your procurement team, you know the fun is about to start.

You also know one more thing: despite what the experience of working with the company to-date is, as a vendor, you are about to see the truest face of your client’s internal culture. You are about to have a deeply authentic brand encounter.

I have said this before, and I will say it again: you can spend millions on systems rationalisation and PR campaigns. But the million ways in which your company will stumble on the way to its chosen future will look mundane and perhaps trivial. It will look like delays and inefficient processes in your procurement, HR and accounting departments. It will look like the wasted time your teams are clocking up trying to find the right form to expense that business lunch, the arguments over whether an employee is allowed three meals a day while travelling on business or the company should only cover two because they would pay for lunch anyway in the office, right? It will look like your 34 hours of business review meetings where no decisions are made.

And all of those things will matter more than your investment in new technology.

I find myself thinking that a lot, to be honest.

The reality is that, as a vendor, you eventually find a way. And that way is usually found by the procurement saints I have written about before. The truth is that, as a vendor, your client procurement team is much easier to deal with than it is for the colleagues inside your organisation.

And we all know, but I will say it anyway, that the issue is not control. It is not process. It is not the fact that risk needs to be managed and records kept. It is never that.

The issue is that feeling of an organisation working against itself, of an organisation inside which colleagues do not act like they are on the same side.

We have lived so long accepting this as the way things are. As an inevitable given.

But it is not.

It is counterproductive, it gets in the way of the work we are trying to do. In fact, what has made digitisation efforts slow across the industry has been invariably people inside organisations getting in the way of each other, acting like they are not on the same team.

So whatever you do next, as you plan your strategy for next year and determine where you are going to spend time and money and energy, think of what it means that your own teams act like they are on opposing sides. That your own processes are booby-trapped. That your own people dread talking to some of their colleagues and apologise in advance to their vendors and suppliers.

Think about it and do something about it.

Because these are brand encounters you can do without.

These are the real reasons why things don’t progress like you want them to.

And in my opinion, these traits are common across incumbents and scale-ups these days. Nobody seems to be immune even though we know by now that none of this is necessary. That control and compliance can be achieved without Kafkaesque complexity. And that culture manifests itself more truly in these encounters than your employee engagement days and the baskets of branded muffins.

We know. And yet we let it happen.

So how about next time you see something like that happening in your organisation, you don’t just navigate it to help the situation get resolved, the project keep moving or the vendor get paid (although please keep doing that also). Next time you see this kind of behaviour… the delays, the unresponsiveness, the opaque processes, the artificial complexity… next time you see this, how about you go hey, you can’t talk to us like that. You are not our real daddy.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.