In 2023 we won a three year contract with a customer worth a little over two million pounds a year. The tender response committed us to acknowledging every order within fifteen minutes and to giving them a portal showing live stock. I read those two sentences for the first time eleven days after the contract was signed, when somebody booked an implementation meeting and circulated the schedules.
Orders from that channel arrive in a file we collect every two hours and confirm after the overnight run. Stock figures are accurate as at six in the morning. Both had been true for nine years and were entirely adequate for every other customer we have.
Nobody lied to anybody. The bid team was asked whether we confirm orders and whether customers can see stock levels, and the honest answer to both is yes. The times in the schedule were the customer's words, taken from their own requirements document, and they went in unchallenged because the person reading them had no way to know that fifteen minutes and two hours are different worlds.
What it cost was eight months of work nobody had planned, an order integration and a near live stock feed built at speed for about a hundred and sixty thousand pounds of effort that displaced two other projects. For five months we paid service credits of roughly nine thousand pounds, because the promise went live with the contract and the capability did not.
Our commercial process was thorough about price and legal terms. Nobody's job was to read the schedules for statements about what our systems do, and bids are confidential, urgent and rewarded on winning.
Any bid above a threshold now has a technical reviewer who reads the schedules rather than the covering letter. We publish a one page statement of what our systems can commit to today, covering acknowledgement times, stock accuracy, data feeds and what the portal can show, and the bid team quotes from it without asking anyone. Anything beyond that page is priced as development, so it appears in the bid as a cost instead of a sentence. Three bids since have carried costed work and two of them were won.
A customer contract is a description of our systems written by people who have never seen them. It is also the only description with a penalty attached.
– Serguey Shinder
