The magic ingredient is in the HOW not the WHAT

Paul Vincent lead the transformation of BT's consultancy procurement and has since left to start his own venture, Insight Sourcing Solutions. In this blog he looks back on his experiences at BT.

During my career I have had the relatively unique experience of operating as a Buyer, User and Approver of professional business services, and this was invaluable to me when I was asked to lead the transformation of BT’s approach to managing and engaging consultants.

Whenever I talk to other buying organisations about my BT experience, people are always more interested in ‘how’ rather than ‘what’ we did. Well our magic ingredient was quite simple really, it was to approach the problem by thinking as business people in procurement roles, rather than as guardians of a procurement process.

In a company like BT, people can interact with procurement in a host of ways depending on their roles. Therefore ‘good procurement’ can look very different depending on which lens they choose to look through. When I initially took on the consultancy category the only shared information related to process compliance. We shone a bright light on existing practice and initiated a business conversation around the art of the possible, for both demand management and sourcing.

We tried to better understand the motivation of key stakeholders. The answer made a difference to how receptive they would be to explore alternative supply options.

We completely overhauled our communication style and initiated various forums/channels to discuss and track business needs.

We rebalanced our relationship with the supply market. Being careful not to undermine our internal customers, we set about re-emphasising the role of the procurement team within the supply market. Over time this has led to a series of mutually respectful relationships.

Finally, we stopped being quite so eager to please. There were a few inevitable bumps in the road when people came up against an unusually more assertive response from the team. However it was these conversations which gave us the best chance of demonstrating our category knowledge and credibility, which is, after all, what the end game was all about. I don’t believe it is realistic to expect procurement as a function to ever be universally loved within an organisation, especially in this spend category. However I do believe it can be universally respected. That for me was always a much better objective to strive for.