“That’s not a governance model, that’s hope.”

You wouldn't hire a contractor to build your house and then leave them entirely unsupervised, with no one on your side who understands what good looks like.

Most people wouldn't do that with a construction project. Organisations do the equivalent with technology projects constantly, and the numbers back it up. A BCG survey of global C-suite executives found nearly half said more than 30 percent of their organisation's technology projects ran over budget and late. McKinsey puts it more bluntly: 17 percent of large IT projects go so badly they threaten the survival of the company.

The vendor is not your advisor

The vendor you hire is there to deliver what they scoped, within the constraints they set, in whatever way works best for them. That is not a criticism, it is just how contracts work. Nobody on that side of the table is incentivised to tell you the scope was wrong, the timeline was optimistic, or the servers were never hardened properly.

I once came into an organisation partway through a project. They had hired a development company to build a reporting tool for their staff, gotten a couple of servers, and been left to figure out the rest. By the time I arrived, the budget had quadrupled, the timeline had grown eightfold, the servers had been hacked, and I do not think the development company could spell QA.

What was actually missing

What they lacked was someone in their corner who could read the technical proposal, ask the uncomfortable questions before the ink dried, and say out loud when what was promised did not match what was being built. That person, an internal advocate or a trusted external advisor, is the difference between a project that lands and one that quietly becomes a cautionary tale.

Without that knowledge on your side of the table, you end up relying on the vendor to define scope, set timelines, and grade their own progress. That's not a governance model. That's hope.

A translation function, not a coding function

A good advisor does not need to know every line of code. They need to understand what the business actually needs, how the technology is meant to serve that need, and where the gaps are between what was promised and what is realistic. That is a translation function, worth every cent, and it only works if their only interest is yours.

If you are heading into a technology project of any size, the first question is not which vendor. It is who on your side actually understands what you're buying. If that person does not exist yet, that is exactly the gap I help close. You can find the details on the contact section of this site.