Why Services Procurement Falls Short and What to Do About It

Why contingent labour models fail when applied to services, how linear sourcing processes block true value, and where operational ownership can make or break your services strategy. 

With Winfield Tufts, Founder & Principle, Featherston Lee.

00:01:51- Why contingent labour strategy doesn’t work for services 

00:20:50 - Why linear processes are holding your services back  

00:39:29 - Identifying the disconnect in responsibility and the impact it has 

00:55:26 - The importance of operations on your adoption and lifecycle 

01:07:18 - Addressing the problem begins with defining it 

Episode Highlights

Transcript

Auto-generated. Please excuse any minor errors.

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;11;24

Jonny Dunning

So. Okay. So I'm happy to be sat here on a Friday recording another podcast. And I'm delighted to welcome, Winfield Tufts to the podcast today. Winfield how are you.

00;00;11;27 - 00;00;16;21

Winfield Tufts

I'm great Jonny Happy Friday. Have Wimbledon on the background. What a great way to start the weekend.

00;00;16;23 - 00;00;41;29

Jonny Dunning

Absolutely. So little background on you. You are an extended workforce strategist and specialist and the founder and principal at Featherston Lee. We actually first got talking due to a LinkedIn post that that you put out, but I it it's titled Why services procurement falls short and what to do about it. I'll come on to in a minute.

00;00;41;29 - 00;00;59;26

Jonny Dunning

I would like you to do a bit of an introduction that kind of leads people into understanding how you came to write that article and how you came to, you know, build all this expertise that you have in, extended workforce strategy. But as soon as I saw that, I thought, okay, this is interesting. Let me read this article.

00;00;59;28 - 00;01;19;22

Jonny Dunning

Let me check out what this guy's got to say. And I was really impressed and I really enjoyed the article and it and it got us into a conversation. And I'm, I'm happy to say it brought us where to where we are now. So to kick us off, would you like to give a bit of an introduction to yourself, your background and kind of what led you towards the, the moment of writing that article?

00;01;19;24 - 00;01;50;26

Winfield Tufts

Yeah, and it's been nice to find some similar of minded souls out there thinking about this topic. So I have 15 years of management consulting experience. I've worked in boutiques in the big four for over a decade, and I'm now running my own firm where I can really focus in on the extended workforce, which is a component of this workforce operations ecosystem.

00;01;50;29 - 00;02;19;11

Winfield Tufts

So when I think about the extended workforce, I'm not just thinking about contingent labor, contingent workforce in the gig economy from a freelancer perspective. I think about the entire non employee population and how that segments into different components that enable organizations to get work done, to solve for that type of philosophical or solve for that type of big, population, if you will.

00;02;19;14 - 00;02;41;17

Winfield Tufts

It requires, I think, a supply chain like mindset and philosophy. In the same way you need to track goods across the globe. You need to track productivity and workers. Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? Who do they work for? How much they cost? The reason I think about that from a supply chain perspective is because that's my background.

00;02;41;19 - 00;03;22;11

Winfield Tufts

When I was working at my previous firms, I grew up in the supply chain and operation space. I landed in procurement transformation, where things just clicked and made sense. So I continue to invest my time in that, seek out projects, and then I was able to grow in my companies in that space, and I was able to land some projects focused on category strategy for contingent labor, helping procurement organizations work with their H.R, I.T, legal, legal and business partners to figure out how do we get better control and visibility around spend, and how do we enable businesses to make the right decisions to get the work in the door that they need to get

00;03;22;11 - 00;04;00;02

Winfield Tufts

done? And over the course of time, we were able to build one project into multiple projects where we were tackling these big global problems around extended workforce, and I started to see a challenge. The challenge was a lot of maturity in your speaking from a procurement mindset, contingent labor category, good control services in place and a desire or a need an expectation to expand into more external labor and services categories.

00;04;00;04 - 00;04;50;18

Winfield Tufts

But challenges with the approach in those challenges were essentially taking the contingent labor mindset or strategy and trying to apply them into professional services such as management consulting. IT professional services, and maybe even in some categories where there was more complex labor involved, such as or your factory shift based workers were. And I think the challenge with that was organizations or teams that were aligned around the contingent labor category or being challenged with using the same tools, the same service providers, the same strategy and approach that worked in contingent labor in different categories that have different stakeholders, different needs, different process variances, which creates different process complexity.

00;04;50;18 - 00;05;22;16

Winfield Tufts

And therefore, the solution is not coming fast enough. The business case is being lost and therefore the ROI is is not being achieved. I've seen that happen multiple times across multiple clients, across multiple categories. For a long time this article has been sitting in my head for it has been sitting in my head. And, when the time came for me to start my own business, start my own firm, which is something I want, I want to cross this part out.

00;05;22;16 - 00;05;32;19

Winfield Tufts

When the time came for me to begin Featherston Lee, it was the first article I was ready to write. It was already in my head. I'd been mulling over it for years.

00;05;32;22 - 00;06;01;15

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, and it's interesting listening to you talking about the kind of disconnect between what was going on in this quite specific contingent labor category, and extending that out into a broader kind of extended capacity and capability within organizations, external service providers working on an output or outcome basis, you know, maybe on KPIs and SLAs, for example, do you think you mentioned some of the differences?

00;06;01;18 - 00;06;25;07

Jonny Dunning

One of the things I always think as well, too, about different stakeholders, different processes, different technology requirements and things like that, I sometimes feel there's also language barrier that that certain things can get slightly lost in translation. And when people are on. I completely agree with you. Hitting problems because they're coming at it with a contingent workforce mentality.

00;06;25;09 - 00;06;29;05

Jonny Dunning

Do you think there's that there's that kind of like terminology barrier to a certain extent.

00;06;29;08 - 00;06;51;22

Winfield Tufts

You know, one of the things I just gave this feedback to a service provider and one of their, in a, in a message was that there's certainly I have an issue with terminology when they when companies say we can tackle extended workforce and do SOW services procurement, but then they use words like individual and assignment and candidate.

00;06;51;25 - 00;07;20;12

Winfield Tufts

I mean to me, yeah, to me I would I would look at them or I would look at a client and say, I'm not confident your service provider understands your use case. The problems statement that you are trying to solve for, you know, I come from a world of management consulting. We were made up of teams, of people not always working full time on the project, on a blended rate card, delivering against an outcome or deliverable.

00;07;20;15 - 00;07;42;29

Winfield Tufts

The narrative that is positioned into how a technology or service provider is able to enable services procurement isn't fitting. That use case isn't. I would not have been applicable in my in my big consulting days to the solution that's been presented. Is that a fit? Is there a product market fit there? So I certainly think that's one of them.

00;07;43;02 - 00;08;08;29

Winfield Tufts

And I think the other challenge is, quite frankly, category expertise. If you think about the, the stakeholders who need to use, management consulting from a strategic perspective, they have a different need and their different levels of, influence at the company. Those category leaders are also very different than the contingent labor leader. They may sit in the same team, but their their stakeholders are different.

00;08;08;29 - 00;08;43;29

Winfield Tufts

Therefore their thinking about the solution is different. So all categories I think, Jonny, follow a life cycle. And organizations need to build an ecosystem of solution providers and technologies that fit the natural life cycle of that category. When it's time to go to market, when it's time to operationally manage, who are the suppliers that's feeding into that? And how does specific technology, quite frankly, enable the business to self-serve and managing how they get work done?

00;08;44;01 - 00;09;09;22

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, I think that's a really important point you make in terms of the specificity, but also the fact of the ultimate objective is to enable the business to self-serve what you you know, it's being a technology vendor in this space. You know, in the early days, our approach was much more talking to procurement about how we could help solve their problems, make them more efficient, save them time for greater savings and all that sort of thing.

00;09;09;25 - 00;09;31;06

Jonny Dunning

But what we've come to realize, just through the market feedback, the important thing for organizations are actually for procurement teams to be able to help their organizations achieve is to actually make it easier for the end user, like the easier, more compliant, make it faster, allow them to buy with value in mind all this sort of thing. And that's that's exactly what you're describing in the sense that is about the end user.

00;09;31;12 - 00;09;51;17

Jonny Dunning

And ultimately this comes back to your original point about this is about how organizations get work done. And if they can't get the work done effectively through whatever channel they need to do, they need to do the work. They are not going to be able to compete in the market. And yet, with such a fast moving, such a volatile market, you can't get the best suppliers.

00;09;51;17 - 00;10;13;05

Jonny Dunning

If you can't work with, you know, speed to market all these things. This critically important, especially when you look at the size of it. So I know that's something that the that you've kind of written about as well in terms of the size and the breakdown or the structure of how organizations get, get work done. What's your how do you come to that and how do you see that?

00;10;13;07 - 00;10;20;19

Jonny Dunning

Looking across different organizations and different kind of industries.

00;10;20;21 - 00;10;42;15

Winfield Tufts

I think, you know, classic answer. I think it all depends in the, in every industry is a little different. So what I like to think about when, when I have a company who says we need to get our contract labor under control, we need to get our contractors under control. We need better contractor management or even we need to better understand contingent workforce.

00;10;42;19 - 00;11;16;08

Winfield Tufts

My first question is what do you mean by that? And more often than not, they can't really articulate it. When I say they I mean team members. Some certain members may have a very exact definition, but I often see that the stakeholders, the end user, customers don't understand it or peers don't get it either. So I try to think about what we say is like, all right, let's start at the top and just say your contractor population is your entire non employee population.

00;11;16;10 - 00;11;49;12

Winfield Tufts

And it breaks down into three segments staff augmentation manage projects and managed services. And I use very simple language because oftentimes what I've seen is that companies have tried to solve for this before. And when you use specific language such as SOW or outcomes and deliverables, independent contractor or even contingent labor, temp labor, there's a lot of emotions associated with those words, right?

00;11;49;12 - 00;12;21;22

Winfield Tufts

So let's say let's talk about how are you and what is the engagement model that you are using to, that you are using to what is the engagement or commercial model that you're using with this population in order to get work done? And then how does that segment across your, your, your spend? And then what are the specific solutions or controls that you need in order to get better visibility in order to get better spend control or even regulatory control?

00;12;21;24 - 00;12;52;27

Winfield Tufts

And so typically, I don't think you'll be surprised as to where companies typically start. But, you know, I think about one client where big, massive global company had, you know, 400 million in staff augmentation, like spend. Then it was about 2 billion in big managed projects, outcome based agreements. And then the remainder, 1.5 or so was in services.

00;12;52;29 - 00;13;25;14

Winfield Tufts

And I think typically you would see that when you're looking at the entire non employee population, the majority of workers, the majority of spend sits in the bigger commercial agreements that sit on project based service, ongoing BPO based contracts. But they start but team start and staff augmentation, right. When I think about staff augmentation, it's like when you're purchasing a resource from a supplier to do a specific job for a specific duration, oftentimes under the direction of a hiring manager.

00;13;25;17 - 00;13;56;08

Winfield Tufts

Right? Yeah. You would typically see this in your contingent labor category, but not but sometimes quite often there's there's staff augmentation hidden in other category categories of spend that gets missed. And when we do when we segment the total non-employee population from a spend perspective and we say, all right, now that we understand the spend and we understand what we mean by contractor in terms of an engagement perspective, we can then say, what are the controls you need in order to control staff

00;13;56;08 - 00;14;38;15

Winfield Tufts

aug to manage services and projects from a contract delivery perspective, from a duration perspective. And what are the tools you need to enable the end to end process? I think very quickly teams realize, oh, there's greater risk in staff. aug let's start with staff aug. Also, it's typically one category we can get control around to build momentum. And then we expand from there into the spend of population where we, manage projects or even services because we can expand category by category and build our internal stakeholder base of evangelists.

00;14;38;18 - 00;15;02;10

Winfield Tufts

Because I think even when you get in and manage projects, you're going to have category complexity, category differences, regional differences that says we can't just go after all of our SOW, which again is another watch point. Let's go at it piece by piece and be very thoughtful and intentional into how we get more control over spend more control over our worker population, and enable our teams to make better business decisions.

00;15;02;12 - 00;15;27;03

Jonny Dunning

So one of the things you mentioned them was about the fact that people will typically approach, contingent workforce as a, as is kind of as a category within, within the overarching category itself. First, I agree with you. It's something that can be you, like, fairly well contained. It's something where they're all mature solutions, service provider solutions or mature technical solutions.

00;15;27;03 - 00;15;50;09

Jonny Dunning

It's it's it's a fairly well served solve problem. Obviously different companies are at different levels in terms of the maturity curve. We mentioned about the risk in that area. You mentioned, almost like that being a particularly glaring risk you're talking about from a misclassification point of view or what where do you see the kind of primary risk that's going to flag it and make people want to address that?

00;15;50;11 - 00;16;19;07

Winfield Tufts

Yeah. So there's a couple points. First of all, I think when we talk about the contingent labor category, the population that's under a staff augmentation like engagement model, it's most mature in your business professional services space. The minute you get into factory temp labor shift based, high demand volume, high volume demand labor, I would really challenge the belief that there is actually, maturity in the market.

00;16;19;07 - 00;16;43;03

Winfield Tufts

I think there's some emerging solutions, but there's a lot of, maturity and capability to be gained in that space. And so I think there's opportunity for programs that are in existence today to look at how can we get better control around the factory temp labor, and how do we enable the plants to get things done as well?

00;16;43;06 - 00;16;53;24

Winfield Tufts

And I lost track. I forgot your second question. Oh. Yeah. Risk risk risk risk. So typically I.

00;16;53;27 - 00;17;45;19

Winfield Tufts

From a risk perspective, there is often a question or a concern around this concept of misclassification. And I think that question also depends on, on, the industry the company is in and what, what their history has been with misclassification. Yeah. I think typically we would recommend that certain subsets of the population, depending upon the nature of the agreement and how work is getting done, it is good to have what I would call a duration control, understanding how long these contractors have been on site and making good, informed decisions as to whether it's time to convert them to an employee or to, make a different, transition to a different commercial

00;17;45;19 - 00;18;12;22

Winfield Tufts

agreement, i.e. big bulk staff augmentation perhaps is better suited to help you and has a business case with, managed services offering. But, you know, misclassification isn't the only risk that needs to be thought about. And quite frankly, there may be more other risks that are more concerning and maybe, may manifest themselves more quickly than the misclassification concern.

00;18;12;25 - 00;18;39;17

Winfield Tufts

One being if we think about factory temp labor, I had a client who was worried about human rights. Labor rights, you know, especially in the consumer products industry where it's a lot of daily rate, hourly, labor. The question is, are workers being taken care of in the factories? I think about in that space as well, there's questions about safety risk.

00;18;39;19 - 00;19;01;21

Winfield Tufts

Yeah, yeah. And then I was talking to an old mentor of mine, and there's some recent articles getting posted to about the cybersecurity risk of workers and the IT access that they're getting, or the ability or lack of ability to confirm the identity of the gig worker that you're employing, who's going to be working remotely, and are they really who they say their identity is?

00;19;01;23 - 00;19;23;14

Winfield Tufts

So I think there's a number of different risks that could be or should be evaluated. But again, when we think about how we're going to segment the population, when we segment it by this way and determine how am I going to engage you, what is the work you need to get done? It provides a framework for saying, what access do you need for how long?

00;19;23;16 - 00;19;46;12

Winfield Tufts

So on and so forth. Do you need a badge or do you not? Well, you need access to my systems. Will you need access to my buildings? And then now with all that structured information, what's the we are now able to say? All right. So what's the governance structure that lets us have visibility or oversight into. Winfield did his project, it ended six months ago.

00;19;46;12 - 00;19;53;12

Winfield Tufts

He still has systems access. We have to turn that off and make sure that we're fixing that control gap. As an example.

00;19;53;14 - 00;20;03;06

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. No, absolutely. And go back to the misclassification issue. Depends on the industry, but it very much depends on the region as well.

00;20;03;07 - 00;20;04;01

Winfield Tufts

Obviously dealing. Yeah.

00;20;04;05 - 00;20;35;29

Jonny Dunning

Oh yeah. Most global organizations, as you mentioned before, it can be quite location specific. You know, very stringent requirements in certain EU countries like France and Germany or the Netherlands, for example. You know, the freelancer regulations are very strict in the Netherlands. So in the UK, in terms of whether you're classified as an employee or not but yeah, so, so you've got this, you've got this overarching structure that needs to be applied to the different.

00;20;36;02 - 00;21;04;08

Jonny Dunning

I always refer to them as like work delivery channels, but basically the organizational capacity to get work done is made up of the internal employees. And there are always other wonderful, these other wonderful avenues. Okay. This is kind of a bit of an obvious question. The obvious answer. So to a certain extent, but it'd be good to just hear you kind of break it down if you take it to, why why is it not under control?

00;21;04;11 - 00;21;23;11

Jonny Dunning

Why do organizations not have this sorted? Because you can't just, you know, take a real basic view of it and say, well, you know, it's it's it's clear and obvious. You should have control over this is clear and obvious. You should be able to answer the questions, you know, the CEO might ask, which might be what's the most effective use of our resources of all resources?

00;21;23;13 - 00;21;25;19

Jonny Dunning

Why haven't they got it under control?

00;21;25;22 - 00;21;31;22

Winfield Tufts

I think a CEO might even ask a simpler question how many contractors do I have in my network? And I don't think companies can answer that one.

00;21;31;23 - 00;21;33;15

Jonny Dunning

Who's on the pitch?

00;21;33;17 - 00;21;40;27

Winfield Tufts

Yeah, right. Why?

00;21;40;29 - 00;22;05;28

Winfield Tufts

I don't think it's how business has been created. Organizational silos, everybody. So when you think about extended workforce and the amount of people let's think about and the amount of people involved, why are there so many people involved? It's because in the end, in order to get control, you need to manage something other than a linear life cycle.

00;22;05;28 - 00;22;26;12

Winfield Tufts

Like if you think about a procurement organization, procurement is responsible for providing the framework for source to pay. Okay. We are just talking about systems access systems access doesn't fit in source to pay, but a contractor is going to show up at some capacity in the life cycle of this contract. Or a company has some level amount of strategy.

00;22;26;14 - 00;23;02;00

Winfield Tufts

There's some level of sourcing activity where this contractor is I is is acquired or assigned. They have to be onboarded. Well in the, in the if you're thinking about a linear source, the pay process procurement is not involved in that anymore. It gets handed off to I.T for onboarding background check whatever. And then then that worker does his onboarding and then goes into services delivery, i.e. he does the work that he was required to do, submits his timesheet, gets invoice or submits his SOW, that's not always a procurement responsibility either.

00;23;02;00 - 00;23;15;25

Winfield Tufts

That's somebody else. So you got these bits and pieces of process responsibility because people operate and think about and and linear process when we need to think more about, the management of a life cycle.

00;23;15;27 - 00;23;46;07

Jonny Dunning

And this is also this sorry to interrupt you. There's just this is also where it ties into the point you're making around self service. Yeah. And that kind of is a it's a more holistic approach because otherwise you get this diffusion of responsibility. And certain people are responsible for certain parts of, the overarching life cycle. But ultimately on one end, you've got a buyer that's a service work buyer on other on the other end, you've got somebody or an organization delivering work.

00;23;46;10 - 00;24;18;27

Winfield Tufts

Yeah. And when you think about life cycle, which should break across these verticals, these siloed verticals of linear processes, you need a cross-functional steer co and I don't think cross-functional steer co’s exist to the level that is required to get this level of oversight, governance or, control in place because it's not how business. I mean, quite frankly, it's just not traditionally how business models have been set up.

00;24;19;00 - 00;24;54;20

Winfield Tufts

And procurement organization should be responsible for the onboarding of an individual, right? That's somebody else's job, somebody else's specialty. But those teams, those leaders need to have the platform or the opportunity to connect and speak and make sure that strategies and operations and transactions, executions are working in sync there. I say there's orchestration.

00;24;54;23 - 00;25;14;07

Winfield Tufts

So that they make the right decisions and their strategies are aligned. Right. So cross, I think why is going back to your question of like, why isn't it in place today? You can probably pick your root cause. But I would say it's because business teams, sometimes business teams are still trying to figure out themselves how to work end to end.

00;25;14;07 - 00;25;20;07

Winfield Tufts

And now it's no longer end to end. It's like it's continuous lifecycle management that's required.

00;25;20;10 - 00;25;58;11

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. And I think in certain areas, particularly kind of outcome based complex services, professional services, there's also been an element of it's just too complicated. Whether it's, you know, saying, well, the technology doesn't support it or, it, it's, it's also the fact that this type of work delivery is growing very rapidly, and we're in a much more services led economy and there's much more outsourcing of work, you know, go back 60, 70 years job for life.

00;25;58;12 - 00;26;21;00

Jonny Dunning

You know, you're a company person and you you get to the gold watch at the end of your how many years service totally different world. Now gig work is much more outsourced service delivery a blend of different, workforce delivery channels. So, the complexity around it, particularly on the services side, I would say you're right. It's not 100%.

00;26;21;01 - 00;26;48;11

Jonny Dunning

solved problem with regards to the kind of staff augmentation in the sense that when you get to the kind of more factory shift based work type scenarios that can be have quite a lot of complexity, very, very fast moving. But the ultimately dealing with people and time in some ways is simpler than dealing with intangibles that you might get within a professional services engagement where it's like, well, how do we define this?

00;26;48;11 - 00;27;06;29

Jonny Dunning

You know, this piece of consulting work? And, well, it's very easy for people to say, well, let's not bother. Let's just work it out as we go along and what, what the outcomes need to look like. Well, we have now what really not so. So I think that's definitely always been a little bit of a, of an excuse available for people to say that's just too difficult.

00;27;07;00 - 00;27;29;25

Jonny Dunning

And obviously the world we're operating in now, hey, that's not acceptable because it's such a large amount of money that is spent on this stuff. And it's such a high reliance organizations have to these external service providers, but also you've got AI now so large amounts of unstructured data. Right. Bring it on. And yeah flex it is the excuse that it's not a solvable problem.

00;27;29;26 - 00;27;50;18

Jonny Dunning

Doesn't exist so much. But I think you're right in, in, in what you talk about in terms of the way that businesses have been set up in the way that they've been structured, but also, you know, businesses, there's so much more flexibility required for businesses now that, you know, we're all having to adapt to technology changes and just the way things work and changes in the market.

00;27;50;21 - 00;28;17;10

Jonny Dunning

But there's a massive pressure on organizations to keep up with that. And as I said at the beginning, staying competitive, you know, it's a it's about being able to adapt to that. And so again, this is an adaptation. The organization we're talking about this you know, we know there are great opportunities for a lot of companies. I definitely feel like the ones that don't do it are going to be putting themselves at risk in the sense of being able to compete in the market.

00;28;17;12 - 00;29;02;06

Winfield Tufts

Yeah. Lots of points there. So working backwards, I think about you talk about companies that need to adapt in the market and be quick. In the end, I think we're talking a lot about how do we enable back office to keep up with front office. Right. And back office can enable front office to win in the market again by creating infrastructure that enables self-service and continuing to focus on providing service quality, which is self-service user experience and bringing insights.

00;29;02;08 - 00;29;27;20

Winfield Tufts

The business moves so fast. The business doesn't want to know the definitions of your contingent labor program. They don't want to know tenure controls or whatever, but they do need to understand their options, the implications of those options so that they can make the best made decision for their business at that time. How do we hire I need a quality engineer in this factory.

00;29;27;20 - 00;29;49;29

Winfield Tufts

What are my options? What's the trend? What's the recommendation and why? Okay. Let's move. Right. I don't think that'll ever go away. I think about, working backwards to what you were saying, Jonny, around the complexity. Right. I appreciate you starting to shift from time and expense to now. Let's talk about, like, outcomes and the complexity of services.

00;29;50;01 - 00;30;15;05

Winfield Tufts

It's just too hard. Has been a good reason for the professional services organization to rate the SOW I, I think fundamentally, there's got to be an opportunity for recognition that says if you know what you want, write it down and tell the services organization what it is you want and set the expectation for your deliverables or for your outcomes.

00;30;15;08 - 00;30;49;06

Winfield Tufts

Don't let the consultant write it for you because they'll know the contract better than you will. And I think you can. You could probably provide the best technology. You could enable the best controls, but in the end, you have to take ownership of what it is you're writing and what it is you want. And as we think about greater dependency upon services, you're buying deliverables, you're buying outcomes, you're spending a lot of time building SLA is in KPIs and metrics.

00;30;49;08 - 00;31;23;04

Winfield Tufts

You're not managing it and monitoring it or measuring it. Are you getting the value that was promised? And I think about projects where. The project was all focused on as an outsider reading the contract, looking at the SLA agreement, getting the data was the data was the performance of the BPO provider or the MSP matching what was agreed upon in the contract?

00;31;23;06 - 00;31;59;11

Winfield Tufts

And if it wasn't, what's the rebate, what's the discount, what's the penalty fee, etc. that wasn't taken advantage of? Or what's the what's the bonus to be give to the provider? Because they were achieving those numbers? I think if one project where is a 100 page contract, I read it all. Yeah. And in the document specifically talking about reporting scorecard KPIs and surveys, I then asked the client said, can you can you please give me a copy of the scorecard?

00;31;59;13 - 00;32;26;06

Winfield Tufts

And I was looking at two completely different scorecards. I don't know, and so the feedback or the recommendation is spend time in your contract building what it is you want. It's going to get you to that value and make sure you have the mechanism in place that allows you to hold that provider and that team accountable to the outcome.

00;32;26;06 - 00;32;29;12

Winfield Tufts

You're going to achieve.

00;32;29;14 - 00;32;43;00

Winfield Tufts

That's how you get control over a growing dependency upon services. And I think how you take complexity and make it simple.

00;32;43;02 - 00;33;11;24

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, yeah, I 100% agree. And it's it's something where there's a lot more meaningful conversation in the market. But I do feel like it's still, fairly immature in terms of a problem that has been solved by a lot of organizations. But that means there's a lot of opportunity to, to solve it. So all of this stuff is, you know, has its complexity.

00;33;11;27 - 00;33;41;11

Jonny Dunning

It's very important to the organizations. You've got these different ways that the organization can get work done. What do you see as the kind of, structural breakdown I've seen? We've discussed this previously, and I've seen a couple of the slides where you break this down very nicely in terms of from a, from a structural element. And then what does that mean in terms of starting to get control.

00;33;41;11 - 00;33;49;02

Jonny Dunning

What what are the kind of what does that lead them to in terms of the steps as far as you're concerned?

00;33;49;04 - 00;34;13;15

Winfield Tufts

So I do like to start my engagements with terminology and definitions. Yeah. What I call it an exercise. What do you mean by that. Right. What do we what do we mean by contractor. Right. Yeah. And you don't need population data. Yeah. I'll I'm telling you, like, let's start with the simple structured data that you have. And oftentimes it's spent and it could be categorized.

00;34;13;15 - 00;34;44;02

Winfield Tufts

It could be it's ideally categorized in some capacity. Geocode your procurement category code whatever. And let's start with that and say what do we mean by contractor. From an engagement model perspective. We come to those three different buckets of your staff, all your projects and your services. And then and then we think about okay, so from these different models, exercise number two, how do we do that.

00;34;44;04 - 00;35;16;09

Winfield Tufts

And we and we let's do a walk through of the life cycle not the process. The life cycle of how, sample vendor or sample worker goes through these major stage gates. And there's a I've built this process taxonomy out to a level three detail, but at the highest level it's strategy. What information do you use? Who do you talk to when you define a strategy for how you're going to get work done?

00;35;16;09 - 00;35;33;15

Winfield Tufts

And it can be really simple, as, are you going to build it or are you going to buy it internal versus external, right. Yeah. The next stage gate is essentially is your supply strategy. How are you going to work with what are the suppliers or how are you going to go to the market to get to that work done?

00;35;33;19 - 00;35;55;17

Winfield Tufts

This is assuming that you have chosen to buy the labor rather than to build it yourself. Right. And then the next step that we walk through is what are the steps you take when you need to actually manage the worker or manage the team? Call it worker management, right. That's onboarding services delivery, payment and billing off boarding. Right.

00;35;55;17 - 00;36;17;23

Winfield Tufts

Very day to day operational stuff. And then the fourth milestone is performance management. What do you do with that information and how does it feed the strategy. Right. And you start to create that cycle. Yeah. And as we talk about it along the way and we ask the right questions around what are the contracts you use. Are there duration controls?

00;36;17;28 - 00;36;45;02

Winfield Tufts

Who do you work with? You start to see where we have a common framework, but there are specific examples or nuances that are very specific and tailored to those those populations. So by this point and you can do this fairly quickly, you have an idea of how big is our extended workforce and where are their control common control points.

00;36;45;04 - 00;37;08;28

Winfield Tufts

Comment. And as well as control gaps, process execution across functions to get into a strategy of how are we going to get work done. The next step would simply to be, well, how big is our employee workforce and what's our total rewards count? Now you start to have a two by two matrix. Yep. And you can.

00;37;09;01 - 00;37;09;06

Jonny Dunning

Yeah.

00;37;09;09 - 00;37;34;17

Winfield Tufts

So you have a two by two matrix where you have your staff augmentation. You have employees, you have your managed projects and you have your managed services. Yeah. And at the highest level you can do this. But I think there's really a lot of value when you get down into functional teams that are there overseeing roles of roles of individuals and say, what are the process responsibilities that we have under our purview and who is doing that work?

00;37;34;20 - 00;37;56;24

Winfield Tufts

Let's plot it. If we plotted our roles and responsibilities for our team and we and we, our plot was simply the amount of spend, because that's the only information we have. What does that tell us about how we get work done? Does this make sense? Are we using employees in roles that are core to our business? No, what are our options?

00;37;56;24 - 00;38;19;25

Winfield Tufts

What would happen if we moved? If I'm manufacturing company and I have a lot of employees in the training role, what would happen if we moved training to an outsourced service? What's the impact of that? Oh, we have a lot of staff augmentation here. We're coming up against the duration control or realizing that the spend is with companies that have been around for a long time.

00;38;19;29 - 00;38;41;24

Winfield Tufts

We need to shift that. Well, what are our options? Well, the options are three. We could outsource it. We could turn it to SOW. We convert them to employees. So suddenly you take a little bit of information plotted on a graph and say, what are the implications if we move some dots around on the board? And that's in the in the digital world, that's a simple PowerPoint exercise.

00;38;41;29 - 00;39;06;01

Winfield Tufts

Or if we're in person, which is always ideal, we put it up on a whiteboard and are literally moving dots around and discussing implications of current state. But then I think what's also very valuable is the next question we ask of these team leaders is, what do you know that's coming up in the future? What are your major projects or initiatives that are on your mind?

00;39;06;01 - 00;39;26;21

Winfield Tufts

And now that you know how your total workforce is organized or who is doing what today, what do you need to know in order to think about who is going to get that work done for that future initiative? Now they can start make informed business decisions.

00;39;26;24 - 00;39;51;18

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, yeah. So a couple of points of I wanted to drill into a little bit more detail. So one of the points that I'm particularly interesting was you said it's about the lifestyle lifecycle, not the process. How in your mind do you differentiate in that? What's the key component of the lifecycle element that takes it away from the process?

00;39;51;20 - 00;40;30;12

Winfield Tufts

Yeah. So I mentioned this earlier, but my view, the way that I started to think through this was again, procurement organizations are going to think source to pay the very linear process of source to pay. So source contract, requisition, Po, invoice, pay. But in terms of getting and I'm talking about comprehensive control, not just spend control, you have to embed in other processes that it manages I.T asset management lifecycle, HR hire to retire, etc..

00;40;30;14 - 00;41;01;08

Winfield Tufts

You have to figure out how do all these processes intersect, leave each other and come back and putting something into onto a linear line, you either have something that just is ongoing, right, or makes it seem very discrete. And when we think about strategy supplier management, a strategy business ideally would own supplier management. Procurement has a role in worker management.

00;41;01;11 - 00;41;27;02

Winfield Tufts

Perhaps there's an HR, but maybe it's also probably more of a, a, operational manager or operational responsibility and performance management. Ideally a program role. Those major stage gates break down into process and into major process steps, if you will. And those are the process owners fit. But we have a mentality of managing a lifecycle. I should also identify where there are handoffs amongst process owners.

00;41;27;05 - 00;41;41;17

Winfield Tufts

Yeah. And how those how those process owners are dependent upon one another and they can think less and end of their own purview and more about quite frankly, I think, enabling the business to get work done.

00;41;41;19 - 00;42;17;02

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. I think it's about thinking it from the from the business's point of view, not to your individual role or your individual department. And in the four, kind of key elements that you mentioned, I think I'm right in saying three was service delivery services delivery, and four was kind of that performance management. And I find it really interesting how in many cases, that sits outside of the responsibility and the view of procurement, you know, that suddenly becomes the responsibility of the program team, you know, what's actually been delivered.

00;42;17;02 - 00;42;39;04

Jonny Dunning

And it's only it's is a retrospective issue. Okay. This is gone way over budget. It was taken way too long or there's a big problem with it. The procurement then get involved and try and stop tying things back and start understanding it. So what you're talking about is this kind of three dimensional lifecycle that exists within the organization, which is like, how does this organization get work?

00;42;39;04 - 00;43;07;23

Jonny Dunning

It needs to be done using this channel or that channel. What does that mean? So I think that's really interesting. And the lack of consolidated visibility around the services delivery and performance management elements of it, I believe are a large are the of the maybe the biggest get part of the gap. Because procurement are very good at and this is partly because they're targeted in this way.

00;43;07;23 - 00;43;26;00

Jonny Dunning

They're very good at understanding what the savings they've made. The point of the contract, you know, what was the budget versus what was the contract, what was the highest bid price versus the contracted price, etc., etc.. What the rate cards, you know, what were the workers operating at all those sorts of things. You know, we all know with with this with people doing work.

00;43;26;03 - 00;43;53;13

Jonny Dunning

It's not it's not like buying a thing. It's not just you've bought that thing. What you're buying might change over time, might very easily change over time or take more time or be bigger or smaller or, you know, it totally different. So I think that's it's really interesting highlighting. I like the way you position it in the sense of a life cycle versus a process with that life cycle pertaining to what's the value, how does the business get value out of this?

00;43;53;15 - 00;43;57;17

Jonny Dunning

How is the business effective in getting work done using this method?

00;43;57;20 - 00;44;02;08

Winfield Tufts

It's all about empowering the business, empowering teams to make decisions and achieving outcomes.

00;44;02;10 - 00;44;03;02

Jonny Dunning

Yeah.

00;44;03;04 - 00;44;06;15

Winfield Tufts

You know.

00;44;06;18 - 00;44;15;13

Winfield Tufts

The handoff between when to talk about procurement, you know, the time the contract assigned value promised is at its highest point.

00;44;15;16 - 00;44;17;02

Jonny Dunning

Yeah.

00;44;17;04 - 00;44;48;26

Winfield Tufts

By the time the contract is done, if it ever expires value delivered is low, is less than. And why? Sometimes real story. Speaking to the contract owner who set in operations, who was responsible for the project. Didn't have access to the contract, literally didn't know what was in the contract and what was negotiated. Therefore couldn't hold the supplier accountable to the service.

00;44;48;28 - 00;44;50;02

Jonny Dunning

Yeah.

00;44;50;04 - 00;45;00;15

Winfield Tufts

So there's a disconnect. There's a disconnect, between procurement and operations and true stories, interviews. It's not my responsibility.

00;45;00;17 - 00;45;01;11

Jonny Dunning

Yeah.

00;45;01;13 - 00;45;39;26

Winfield Tufts

And for that individual, for that team, it may not be. It doesn't have to be. But from a corporate strategy perspective, there needs to be a team in the center that has the visibility, that understands how to coordinate, influence and persuade teams to operate in order to enable the business and to identify, to bring insights where there is opportunities, where the where, where there are risks, and to bring the right team members together to make the best fit decision.

00;45;39;26 - 00;45;56;21

Winfield Tufts

Again. When you think with a life cycle mentality, you know the process owners and you know how to bring them in. When you're thinking linear process, you know your team, you know your maybe immediate touchpoints, but you don't see the bigger picture.

00;45;56;24 - 00;46;00;21

Jonny Dunning

And so in terms of, you know, coordinating that.

00;46;01;24 - 00;46;07;20

Jonny Dunning

Do you see that as being procurement responsibility and opportunity?

00;46;07;22 - 00;46;09;26

Winfield Tufts

It could be.

00;46;09;29 - 00;46;42;03

Jonny Dunning

I mean, I think it's you know, you mentioned about insights. Insights required data. Yeah. And whoever controls that data and brings that data into the organization and generates those insights, you know, it's pretty powerful. It's pretty useful to that organization. And as a high level of importance, I always think, is there's such an opportunity, you know, procurement, ultimately in the middle of a process facilitating both sides of it.

00;46;42;05 - 00;47;08;22

Jonny Dunning

And they all and more and more procurement people are talking about driving business value, not savings. So it feels like there's a real evolution that's happening. But the puts procurement in that position when they're getting smarter about understanding the holistic lifecycle, empowering people to do things self-serve, using the right tech to make that a possibility, and also to make sure that they've got the data.

00;47;08;25 - 00;47;31;05

Jonny Dunning

It's a pretty powerful place to be because ultimately, they're interfacing with their internal organization to see how they operate and how they're fulfilling the needs of the of the organization. They're also dealing with the external, work channels, workforce channels that are helping to power the business along, and then also understanding the interactions between the two of them.

00;47;31;07 - 00;47;48;29

Jonny Dunning

They know what the internal parties are saying, but the external parties, oh, these guys are terrible. You know, they're the they're putting junior consultants on it when it should be senior consultants. Those wasting our time. The change in the script, they're marking their own homework, writing their own requirements. Or they might be saying they're fantastic and they're adding an enormous amount of value.

00;47;49;01 - 00;48;20;25

Jonny Dunning

And then you've got the external parties giving the same insights to procurement about their own teams. Hey, look, you know, this project is massively over run, but that's because the internal team were totally disorganized. They weren't turning up to meetings. They were they were postponing stops. They were on holiday. They didn't have the information. The brief changed. This is an incredibly, if you think about the efficiency of an organization, if you take that holistic view, it's a very pivotal position to be in, in terms of if you can understand what's going on with all this stuff.

00;48;20;27 - 00;48;25;13

Winfield Tufts

So I think here's my view on that.

00;48;25;15 - 00;48;50;04

Winfield Tufts

From an E.W. perspective, extended workforce, I think there's a really good logical argument for procurement to be the organization that sits in the center. They should be the ones establishing buying channels. They should be the ones who own the supplier relationships, who are delivering the services. And ideally, they should be the one closing out and tying out. Did you get the value and the quality that was expected at the beginning?

00;48;50;07 - 00;49;26;28

Winfield Tufts

Right. But here's also the reality of the situation. Broadly speaking, current programs, you know, program ownership. If you want to think about a contingent workforce program or extended workforce program, the big question that I get a lot is who owns it? It's like 5050 procurement or HR. So what do we do about that? I like to say don't change ownership right now, but build a team under you that's cross-functional that thinks to serve the business that are business case bird dogs and understands that lifecycle so that they they may have a grounding from a functional grounding of where to focus.

00;49;26;28 - 00;49;34;26

Winfield Tufts

But they can think they can think through truly cross-functional. And I think.

00;49;34;28 - 00;50;02;05

Winfield Tufts

What you'll probably see is an ebb and flowing of ownership of who should sit in the center, because the minute you get your extended workforce under control, or you have good repetition and momentum, you know, going back to that two by two matrix, your three segments of extended plus your employee, well, suddenly you're starting to be able to make real total talent decisions, right?

00;50;02;06 - 00;50;35;05

Winfield Tufts

Total talent's not a myth, but you have to think about it differently, right? It's not individual. It's not. It's not at the individual assignment leader level. It's thinking about how do I get work done with employees and all my variety of commercial models. So I envision likely procurement will eventually take over as the governance function. Coordinating orchestrating what I'll call extended workforce optimization.

00;50;35;07 - 00;50;58;28

Winfield Tufts

But as the value starting to be seen and the start thinking about. Mashing up insights of employees and non employees, I think eventually seeing it going back to HR and HR, using it as a true total tab, total workforce strategy enabler.

00;50;59;00 - 00;51;21;21

Jonny Dunning

It feels like the sort of topics that people myself are talking about now. The next step in the evolution from, say, maybe 3 to 5 years ago, where people were kind of making the leap of saying, we need to talk about the work, not the worker. You know, we need to approach this is the point of view of what's the work that needs to be done.

00;51;21;23 - 00;51;47;19

Jonny Dunning

And, rather than thinking what worker, what type of worker she like, she like get what type of worker do I want is what do you need to do? That's what's the most effective way to fulfill that. Feels like this is the next step in that evolution of that journey, really, in terms of the sophistication required to then say, okay, now we're looking at the work, we're looking at what does the organization need to achieve and the different channels that it can achieve.

00;51;47;19 - 00;52;10;28

Jonny Dunning

It's really I mean, not just making a decision. It's not just about making the decision as to which channel to use. It's also going the next step to say, right, okay, which channels are giving us value and then take it into the depths of within each channel. Which suppliers are giving us value while using these supplies? Is, is it just because we always use them or because I do a great job?

00;52;11;00 - 00;52;44;25

Jonny Dunning

And I think this is an area where some people will naturally assume that, particularly in professional services and consulting, for example, that firms will be resistant to IT, supply firms will be resistant to it because they don't want the visibility, you know, lifting the veil on, you know, what's going on, etc.. But I think there's there's a, there's the other side to it as well, where actually if, if suppliers are doing a great job, sometimes that's not recognized and it's organizations are making cuts, you know, they might just be told to cut your consulting budget by x percent, you know, shut that spend down.

00;52;44;25 - 00;53;04;00

Jonny Dunning

We've got to save some money. And and get rid of your suppliers that are you know going over time going over cost. But if you actually had the insights and the audit trail of what was going on with those projects, you might understand that the reason they're going overbudget is because they were poorly scoped or or actually the scope expanded.

00;53;04;03 - 00;53;27;13

Jonny Dunning

And it might be that those projects are actually leading to a lot of your bottom line growth or new product development, for example. Yeah. It also might be that, as I said before, the supplier might be, running over time on a lot of projects, but that might be symptomatic of ineffective performance within internal teams that needs addressing rather than cutting the external suppliers, which might be power in the business.

00;53;27;13 - 00;53;40;28

Jonny Dunning

So I do think that the more that this is, the more efficient this process is, the more effective the more data, the more insights overall. I think that's a net positive for the supply chain, as well.

00;53;41;01 - 00;54;10;24

Winfield Tufts

Yeah. I love that you bring this up. Excuse me. As I'm adjusting my sun, everyone on the camera, this is really getting down to business resiliency I think. Right, right. So. When you don't know where your contractors are and you have to make fast cuts, where do you go if you don't know what they're doing? It's really hard to make cuts.

00;54;10;24 - 00;54;38;16

Winfield Tufts

You go where, you know, there are workers doing that. I dare say that there's increased risk that because you don't have, visibility into your extended workforce, you have to look at your employee workforce. And that's really sad. I can think of a couple clients where, they were gaining visibility into their contractor workforce, but the economy was shifting super fast, and they had to make decisions.

00;54;38;19 - 00;55;14;10

Winfield Tufts

And those decisions had to go more towards the employee side because they were struggling with where contractors, we literally don't know what they're doing. And oh my gosh, these contractors are doing vital things to keep our locations running. So you know what we did? We put up a two by two matrix and said, all right, for the future, let's talk about the roles and the work that's getting done and think about as what are the roles that are critical, your business that aren't in your employee workforce, and what are options?

00;55;14;10 - 00;55;45;20

Winfield Tufts

You have to bring them back. And how do we make sure that this exercise, this really simple exercise is done twice a year so that we can always think about if and when economy shifts, what are our options to make adjustments quickly? Are we engaging? Are we using providers in roles that will that will create slow transition when we need fast?

00;55;45;22 - 00;55;54;07

Winfield Tufts

And therefore, do we need to change up our commercial model or our supplier management or supplier strategy, or our work strategy to get stuff done?

00;55;54;10 - 00;56;21;20

Jonny Dunning

I, I would naturally assume that for C-suite executives, that's something they can buy into. You know, organizational maneuverability, you know, flexibility, being able to react in the market. How how difficult has that been in those situations to really kind of sell that into organizations that that executive level.

00;56;21;22 - 00;56;50;01

Winfield Tufts

You know, what we're really talking about here is talking to an operations officer. And I think that's still. A little difficult. The best projects where we've been able to make have greater success is, for one, when the operating leaders are involved and are in the room.

00;56;50;04 - 00;57;20;03

Winfield Tufts

Where projects like this have tended to fall short has been when we start in procurement or HR and we don't get participation for whatever reason, interest, lack of awareness or lack of willingness to participate or sometimes fear in politics to get operations to participate from the beginning. Because if you think about it, operations need to get stuff done right.

00;57;20;06 - 00;57;55;11

Winfield Tufts

Don't give me all the rules, just tell me. But also, fix my problem. But don't shut down my plant. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, in order to do that, I need to better understand. I need to work with you to understand what your issues are, how you use work, what it is that you do, etc. and when we have these center led service functions, procurement and HR, not regularly engaging with essentially their internal customer, that voice of the customer is lost.

00;57;55;13 - 00;58;29;02

Winfield Tufts

And structure is not well implemented nor well adapted in some part because the fit isn't there. But also there may be a fit issue, but you may have a really great tool that serves, that serves that team to make better business decisions. And they're not they're not having it in their hands. So I think about, and then I think about the projects where operations has been involved from the beginning in some cases, it was because there was recognition from the operations team that they had a challenge.

00;58;29;05 - 00;58;45;29

Winfield Tufts

Right, right, right. So I would encourage the, the listeners on this call from procurement and HR is to engage with your customers, bring operations to the table at the beginning. And it's never it's never too early to bring in your end user. Customer.

00;58;46;02 - 00;59;21;04

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, I think that's a really valid point. One of our customers always tells a great story about, you know, basically engaging with us and engaging with an intermediary. So they basically kind of, you know, semi outsource the problem. We were the enabling technology for this, intermediaries to help them sort out the services procurement. And one of the crucial things that they did, the key stakeholder, it was absolutely, you know, like given from the start was you basically had what he called his Tiger team, which was effectively almost like the most dissenting people from the operations.

00;59;21;08 - 00;59;49;22

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, but was likely to put up the objections to go, why are we even doing this? What is what's this? Don't get in my way. What's this going to do to help me get my job done? I'm trying to make the business successful here, and engaging those team members at the very beginning was massively important in getting the fantastic levels of adoption that they've achieved, exactly as you said, because not only was it, that engagement, but the solution was crafted more effectively in the first place.

00;59;49;24 - 01;00;00;29

Jonny Dunning

And that comes back really to your life cycle point, because, yep, that's where you're fully engaging with the lifecycle and not just an individual linear process.

01;00;01;01 - 01;00;27;09

Winfield Tufts

Yeah. And we were talking about like when you're engaged with the lifecycle you're engaging with process owners. But those process owners are interacting with an internal customer base that is also very diverse as well. So those end users who want a good user experience or who want good service quality, all have are likely going to have different, different desires, different expectations of whatever solution or whatever governance structure that's coming out.

01;00;27;09 - 01;00;56;08

Winfield Tufts

Right. So that's another critical thing to think about. And shoot, I, I should have written this down, Jonny I was going to say another point, but nonetheless, no, your end user. Oh yeah. Right. So here's the thing. When we think about this, this teaser, that change management, I know was the statistic. I remember when I was at EY, there was a statistic that said 70% of major transformations fail due to poor change management.

01;00;56;10 - 01;01;25;15

Winfield Tufts

And change management is not communications and it's not another project plan. Yeah, it starts with bringing your end users in from the very beginning and getting the voice of the customer. And yeah, I think it's a it is a hard but good strategy to bring in the biggest naysayer at the start. But what that's also going to do is it's going to help you identify when you say, all right, we know who we're talking about from, what do we mean by that perspective?

01;01;25;17 - 01;01;49;07

Winfield Tufts

We know what it is we do and who we interact with and where there are gaps perspective. And we know who we interact. So when we know who we interact with, we have an inventory of stakeholders. Now we understand their problem and what to do about it. We can also start to figure out who needs to be aware of the change versus who needs to adopt change.

01;01;49;09 - 01;02;12;08

Winfield Tufts

And the adoption population is the group that needs a lot more time and effort, probably a lot more participation then the group that's going to get communicated to because they just need to be aware. But the adopters are the ones who have to be involved and quite frankly, like co-solutioning or at least providing their input along the way, making sure that you that their, their work is not getting slowed down.

01;02;12;10 - 01;02;18;13

Winfield Tufts

Nobody wants nobody wants to know the process control that's just going to delay getting work done. That's not the purpose.

01;02;18;15 - 01;02;48;03

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. And you know, they might they could be coming from a position where before this is all streamlined. And my beautiful they've got two options. They can follow the process. Yep. Which is probably going to be really time consuming. Slow horrible semi manual. Just a nightmare which is slowing them down and stopping them doing the work and making their life miserable and probably doing the same to people in procurement and possibly HR as well.

01;02;48;05 - 01;03;08;10

Jonny Dunning

Or they can just ignore all of it and just go completely off-piste and just, you know, do what they want to do and just get on with it and hope that nobody kind of, you know, shines a light on it. Yeah. I think when it comes down to it, most people within most organizations, most professionals do care about things like is a job, is a good job being done?

01;03;08;12 - 01;03;31;19

Jonny Dunning

Is is what my organization's paying for worth the money? It's paying. You know, I think most people do care about wasting organizational money. They want their organization to be successful because that helps them be successful. Yeah, they keep their job. They they get promoted. So I think because this is something that we care about our own lives, personal lives, we look at what we buy.

01;03;31;21 - 01;04;05;22

Jonny Dunning

Is it good? What's the rating? How many stars is that got? You know, how many people recommended it? Do I like it? You know, how much did I pay for all these things? Did it do what it said it was going to do? It's the it's. I can be brought into that, as a concept early on, given the ability through the way that the program operates, the, the life cycle operates, and, that definitely is an area where insights and data are and, you know, the sort of feedback mechanisms that can come from the correct processes, correct use of technology, etc..

01;04;05;24 - 01;04;27;03

Jonny Dunning

I think people have the opportunity to really buy into that from an organizational perspective. But it's because because sometimes you get this slightly jaded view that procurement might just think the buyers just don't care. They just need to get that this is what you need to get my job done or get work done. But I think there is definitely the capacity and most professionals, the vast majority of professionals, to want to take a pride in the fact that it was a really good piece of work.

01;04;27;03 - 01;04;39;10

Jonny Dunning

They did a great job. You know, I don't want to be having to mess around with everything changing or not knowing what the rules are. The people want to do a good job. Yeah. And as I say, they want to make their organization successful.

01;04;39;13 - 01;04;46;19

Winfield Tufts

And in my entire career as management consultant, I've not done an interview where someone was like, I don't care.

01;04;46;22 - 01;05;01;15

Jonny Dunning

But that was the, what's that film, Office Space? Yeah. Do you remember that one where it's like the Boss isn't it? And what what do you do? I didn't really do anything. I just kind of, just zone out for a couple of hours. You know? That doesn't happen to me now.

01;05;01;15 - 01;05;04;29

Winfield Tufts

But even then, I would. I've thought about that scene and.

01;05;05;01 - 01;05;05;19

Jonny Dunning

Love that film

01;05;05;24 - 01;05;25;16

Winfield Tufts

You know, when I. When I started, when I started consulting, there are a lot of jokes about, oh, what are you, the bobs? And we can make those the big inside joke. I don't know if I can make an inside joke about office space, and I don't think it would land as much as it did, you know, 15, 20 years ago and farther and farther in in history.

01;05;26;14 - 01;05;41;17

Jonny Dunning

But but so when you look at that, that, that film to a certain extent the apathy and the apathy comes from being disconnected, disconnected from the overarching strategy, what we're even trying to do. What does it mean? Yeah. You know, what's the what's the route to success.

01;05;41;20 - 01;06;11;16

Winfield Tufts

Exactly? I so so I've, I've done some deep thinking about office space. Right. And that character he's apathy. He's he's apathy. He has apathy about what he's trying to do. But I think he, he still there's still a level of care. Right. I, I would argue that that character still wants to he wants to do a good job, but feels incredibly powerless to do it.

01;06;11;18 - 01;06;13;04

Jonny Dunning

I think that's exactly right.

01;06;13;07 - 01;06;20;09

Winfield Tufts

Which is probably why the boss gravitated to him so much. Know the comedians love the guy who wants to problem solve and is stuck.

01;06;20;12 - 01;06;41;17

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And as you say, engaging with the people that really need to get stuff done is going to bring out the thorny issues straight away. So I think we've covered the topic really, really nicely. There are there any, are there any particular points you want to cover about what you would advise people to do as a next step?

01;06;41;19 - 01;06;50;25

Jonny Dunning

You know, in terms of engaging with the market their peers or just what they might do to get started.

01;06;50;27 - 01;07;24;06

Winfield Tufts

Oh, man. Yeah. There's a phrase that I used a lot. How do you eat an elephant piece by piece? Yeah. And I really think about is you don't need technology to get started in this space. You will need technology in the future. But before you can. Let me think about my response for the second. I think what you need to get started is three things.

01;07;24;09 - 01;07;56;10

Winfield Tufts

You need some simple, structured data you need to think about how are you engaging with your extended workforce or your services supply chain on a commercial level, and you need someone from the business that wants to work with you and solve problems. Find what their problem is, help them understand how they get work done. From an extended workforce perspective and an internal workforce perspective.

01;07;56;13 - 01;08;12;15

Winfield Tufts

Work with them through the life cycle and you'll find the control point gaps. You'll find where technology needs to be improved. You'll find where it just might be a policy or a guidance document. They will be your evangelist, and then you expand from there.

01;08;12;17 - 01;08;38;05

Jonny Dunning

That's a good answer. I was asked a very similar question. The other day, very specifically related to the the services procurement side of it. And, one of the kind of lines that my thought process went along with more was kind of sort of semi emotional in the sense of like, somebody's got to take responsibility, you know, the organization, the, the problem.

01;08;38;05 - 01;09;05;18

Jonny Dunning

And maybe no one's got direct responsibility or ownership of it. Yeah. That's an opportunity for somebody to really take responsibility and say let's, let's do something cool. Let's, let's really make this, beautiful and streamlined. And I think going back to the article that you wrote that first got us in the conversation, I also think just by being like curious and inquisitive, what are other companies doing?

01;09;05;18 - 01;09;30;06

Jonny Dunning

You know, I love having this topic conversation and I want I want it to be more of this type of conversation because and also that peer to peer interaction where you get companies sitting around a table. And I've seen that many times running roundtable type sessions where organizations start talking to each other. And there's just that kind of, relief and understanding that most organizations are suffering with the same problems when it comes to this.

01;09;30;08 - 01;09;31;05

Winfield Tufts

Yeah, totally.

01;09;31;08 - 01;09;55;04

Jonny Dunning

It's not unique to you. There are other people trying to solve it. People have got different ideas. And then, as you say, having those internal conversations, understanding the problem of what it's specifically looks like within that particular organization, with its own technology set up, with its governance infrastructure, with its particular industry foibles and all those sorts of things.

01;09;55;06 - 01;10;15;18

Jonny Dunning

There's a lot that people can do and, and, and so, you know, the conversation within the market is open to helping to move these things along. And I'm really grateful for you being a voice in the market, putting your opinions out there. And, you know, having this problem solving attitude towards it. Because I think it's a really worthwhile conversation.

01;10;15;18 - 01;10;20;10

Jonny Dunning

I think this sort of conversation that a lot of people want to have. So I really appreciate it.

01;10;20;12 - 01;10;37;29

Winfield Tufts

I'm glad to be here. You know, I had a just one more anecdote on that is my, I have a mentor who has a program. They have the right tools in place. They're transacting. So he went to a stakeholders and said, if you could solve if we could help you solve one problem that you're wrestling with, what would it be?

01;10;38;01 - 01;10;58;23

Winfield Tufts

Right. And it was it cyber security, right. So the program leaned into, from the life cycle perspective, improving the onboarding in the off boring steps of the life cycle. This is someone who sits and talent acquisition. But he's thinking from a life cycle mentality. He found a stakeholder who got value from the program and now they're expanding. So start small.

01;10;58;23 - 01;11;13;13

Winfield Tufts

Find someone to partner with, provide service quality. And Jonny, I appreciate the opportunity to, participate in this platform with you and with Zivio and, really happy that I found some like minded souls with hashtag services procurement on LinkedIn.

01;11;13;16 - 01;11;27;00

Jonny Dunning

Excellent. And, you know, as I said, looking forward to seeing the conversation just grow and grow. Yeah. So thank you so much. How can how would you recommend people find you? Obviously on LinkedIn, I know you quite active on LinkedIn, but what's the best places for people to find you?

01;11;27;02 - 01;11;44;15

Winfield Tufts

Sure. My email is Winfield at Featherston Lee dot com That's Winfield at Featherston Lee dot com. My website is Featherston Lee, but you can also find me on LinkedIn. I, yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so I can respond relatively quickly as well.

01;11;44;17 - 01;11;53;22

Jonny Dunning

Brilliant stuff. Listen, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Keep the conversation going. And, I look forward to hopeless, no doubt catching up again soon.

01;11;53;24 - 01;11;55;17

Winfield Tufts

All right Jonny, have a great weekend.

01;11;55;19 - 01;11;59;12

Jonny Dunning

Thank you very much. You too. Excellent