Procurement Doesn't Always Reward Capability. It Often Rewards Deniability.

There is an uncomfortable truth about procurement that rarely gets said plainly: buyers don’t always choose the firm best suited for the work. Often, they choose the firm that feels safest to defend. That distinction shapes who gets access, who gets trusted, and who gets paid to solve the most important problems.

I have seen this from both sides of the table. Earlier in my career, I often needed small but highly specialized firms—they brought the experience and expertise that I simply couldn’t find elsewhere, and I often continued working with them for years because they consistently delivered.

While leading professional services at Elastic Path, I took a chance on a relatively small implementation partner: Nortal. I didn’t select them because they were the biggest name in the market; far from it. I selected them because they proved that they could deliver well. Over time, they became a trusted partner, and years later I found myself joining the company to lead its Canadian operations.

But I’ve also experienced the other side of the coin. I saw firsthand how often procurement decisions favoured brand name over capability. Time and again, I watched exceptional teams compete against much larger firms where the logo often carried more weight than the people delivering the work.

These experiences—as a buyer, a client, and a consulting leader—reinforced something for me: value depends entirely on the people doing the work, not the logo on the proposal.

Why the bias persists

Procurement officers are rational actors operating inside a risk-averse system. They are rarely rewarded just for picking a firm that delivers exceptional value; they must consider risk, reputation, and many other factors. If a major firm underdelivers, it’s easy to frame it as a difficult project, but if a smaller firm underdelivers, it can quickly bear the label of a bad selection decision.

So, choosing the known name is often seen as safer internally, even when it isn't better. Of course, nobody writes that incentive into policy, but that doesn’t stop it from influencing behaviour. It shows up instead in minimum corporate experience thresholds, insurance requirements, scoring models that index on contract volume and past organizational experience, and the quiet assumption that bigger must mean safer. The result is predictable: organizations pay premium rates, get senior people at the pitch and junior people on delivery, and receive proposals that are shaped more by reusable templates than by the actual problem in front of them.

Proxies are not enough

None of this means large firms can't perform. They bring scale, specialist assets and depth when the work genuinely calls for it. The problem starts when scale substitutes for capability, and a global methodology substitute for proof that the proposed team understands the client's actual problem.

Procurement is built to evaluate inputs, not judgment. It can measure years of experience, insurance limits, team size, and number of similar projects. What it struggles to measure is whether the people actually assigned to the work have solved this kind of problem before, and whether, despite that experience, they can still approach each engagement with genuine curiosity, humility, and a commitment to truly listening instead of assuming they know the answer.

In the absence of this, decisions default back to proxies; firm size for quality, brand for trust, prior related work for relevance, methodology for insight.

Those proxies aren't worthless, but they are imperfect indicators of project success. In fact, recent procurement controversies, implementation failures, and governance issues have proven that well-known brands are no guarantee of successful delivery. Size doesn’t necessarily eliminate risk; it just makes the decision easier to justify after the fact.

The concentration risk nobody prices in

Organizations often try to de-risk complex programs by handing them to one large prime vendor. One contract, one brand, one place to direct pressure if things go wrong— “the single throat to choke”, as they say. It feels very clean, but it concentrates the risk rather than distributes it. If that vendor staffs the work poorly or loses key people, the entire program is exposed, and there's usually no fallback built into the model.

That doesn’t mean every project should be split among multiple firms. Some shouldn’t. But for complex transformations spanning strategy, service design, impact analysis, data, technology, governance, and change management, it’s unrealistic to expect one organization to do it all and do it well. A consortium lets government assemble the right capability against each part of the problem, while keeping one hand on overall governance and commercial control. If one underperforms, that workstream gets corrected or replaced and the program doesn't go down with it.

What really predicts success

Complex initiatives rarely fail because the answer was missing from a framework. They fail because the work needed judgment, proper sequencing, and someone willing to tell the client the truth before the cost of avoiding it gets too high.

The best advisors aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest methodology libraries. They’re the ones who recognize patterns because they’ve lived through and fixed similar problems before; they know where governance may stall, where policy intent and operational reality can collide, and importantly, they take the time to assess which seemingly small decisions can quietly become big challenges later. That kind of pattern recognition is difficult to score on a procurement grid, but it’s a strong predictor of success.

A different path forward

If organizations are serious about value, SME participation, and business outcomes, they need to stop treating supplier size as a comfort blanket. None of this is complicated, but it does take discipline.

Score named practitioner experience, not just corporate experience. Limit how much weight boilerplate methodology carries. Require delivery teams to commit named senior people for meaningful portions of the work. Break large advisory contracts into smaller, outcome-based packages where possible. Build procurement pathways that let specialist firms compete as real delivery partners, not symbolic subcontractors added to satisfy a checkbox. Lastly, get comfortable with properly governed consortiums, clear accountability, defined packages, and the potential need to replace underperforming pieces without destabilizing the whole program. None of these changes are radical; they better align procurement with the likelihood of successful delivery.

The choice between a large consulting firm and a boutique advisor shouldn't come down to logo. It should come down to the people doing the work, the experience they bring, the curiosity they embody, and the ownership and accountability they're prepared to carry.

Organizations shouldn’t buy small for the sake of it. They need to buy capable. So, when awarding the next contract, maybe the better question isn’t “what’s the safest bet?” but “which team is truly most likely to succeed and deliver real business value?”