From procurement to production: what public-sector delivery gets wrong

Most public-sector software projects that stall don’t stall because of a bad technology choice. I’ve seen good teams pick good stacks and still watch a project stumble in exactly the same place every time: the gap between what got procured and what actually needs to be built.

Here’s what that gap usually looks like in practice. Someone writes requirements for a tender, necessarily, because that’s how public procurement works: you need something specific enough to score competing bids against fairly. Those requirements get written by people who are experts in policy or programme design, not in how the eventual system will actually get used day to day. A vendor wins, and then there’s often a long quiet stretch between sign-off and the first working system anyone outside the delivery team can actually click through.

Discovery isn’t a phase, it’s the job

The projects I’ve seen go well treat discovery as part of delivery, not something to rush through before the “real” work starts. That means sitting with the people who will actually use the system, the clerk processing applications, the officer who has to explain to a citizen why something’s delayed, and understanding the workflow you’re replacing before assuming you already understand it.

It also means shipping something reviewable early. Not a slide deck. Not a design document. Something a stakeholder can click through and say “no, that’s not actually how it works” about, because that sentence said in month two is a lot cheaper than the same sentence said in month eleven.

When a citizen-facing system doesn’t work, there’s rarely an easy workaround for the person on the other end of it.

That’s the part that raises the stakes on public-sector delivery specifically. A broken B2B ordering flow is an annoyance. A broken benefits system is somebody not eating this month, or a chief unable to register a resident who genuinely needs to be registered. That’s reason enough on its own to take the handoff between procurement and delivery seriously, instead of treating it as paperwork to get through before the project can properly start.

If you’re navigating that handoff right now and want a second opinion, I’m happy to talk it through.

— Ali