The Difference Between Following a Process and Understanding What You Actually Need
A building manager once got a complaint from a tenant that staff were not happy with the office coffee.
So the manager did exactly what they were trained to do. Looked up the company process. Found three suppliers. Got quotes. Picked one. Completed the paperwork. Got it approved.
New coffee machine installed. Problem solved.
Except the coffee machine was never the problem.
The staff just did not like the beans.
What Went Wrong
Nothing went wrong with the process. The building manager followed every step correctly. The problem was that the process started at the wrong point.
Before a single supplier was contacted, no one had stopped to ask the right questions:
What specifically did the staff say?
Were they actually using the coffee machine, or had they stopped altogether?
Did the tenant even want to keep the machine, or was this an opportunity to revisit the arrangement entirely?
What was the budget appetite?
Were there preferences around locally sourced or fairtrade products that might shape the solution?
Any one of those questions would have surfaced the real issue in minutes. Instead, a procurement process was run, a contract was awarded, equipment was installed, and the problem remained.
This is not a story about a bad building manager. It is a story about what happens when procurement training is designed as an instruction manual for following steps rather than a framework for thinking.
What I See When I Walk Into Organisations
When I assess procurement capability in an organisation, the signs that a team has been trained to process rather than think are usually visible within the first conversation.
The first sign is a long and complicated process that nobody has reviewed in years. When I ask why something is done a particular way, the answer is usually "that is just how we do it." There is no commercial logic behind the steps. The rules exist because they were written down once and nobody has questioned them since.
The second sign is that the thinkers in the team have found ways around the process. When capable buyers are consistently circumventing the system, the instinct is often to tighten the rules. The more useful question is why they felt the need to go around it in the first place. In my experience, it is almost always because the process was getting in the way of a sensible outcome.
The third sign is purely reactive procurement or purchasing activity. When every piece of work lands on the team's desk as an urgent request with no lead time, it tells me the function has no forward visibility and no influence over how decisions are made upstream. Reactive procurement is process-driven by default. There is no time to think when you are constantly responding.
The Garden That Kept Dying
I once worked with another building where a tenant had a patch of garden that was a persistent problem. Every six months the plants and lawn were replaced. Three months later they were wilted and brown. The cycle repeated, reliably and expensively, for years.
Soil testing revealed nothing. Increasing the watering frequency made no difference. The instinct each time was to go back to the supplier, replace the plants, and hope for a better result.
But this time, an insightful facilities manager started asking the right questions. It was quickly revealed that the plants had started dying a few months after some construction works were completed on site. The lead contractor had disconnected the irrigation system during the works and never reconnected it. The plants were not diseased or poorly specified. They were dying of thirst.
A simple conversation saved a very expensive pattern of behaviour.
The parallel with the coffee story is clear. In both cases, the organisation kept returning to the market to solve a problem that the market could not fix. In both cases, the right questions at the start would have changed everything.
What Good Procurement Thinking Looks Like
The difference between a buyer who follows a process and a buyer who thinks is not about intelligence or experience. It is about where they start.
A process-trained buyer starts with the steps. A thinking buyer starts with the problem.
That means slowing down before approaching the market. It means talking to the people who will live with the outcome, not just the person who raised the request. It means understanding the budget, the constraints, the preferences, and the history before a single supplier is contacted. It means asking whether the market is even the right place to look for a solution.
None of this is complicated. But it requires procurement capability programs to teach buyers how to think about a problem rather than how to fill in a form.
The organisations that get this right do not just run better procurement processes. They make better decisions, build better supplier relationships, and stop spending money solving the wrong problems.
Debbie Hack is the founder and Principal Procurement Advisor at QBE Consulting. QBE Consulting specialises in procurement capability development, operating model design, supplier governance and procurement-led transformation.
