by Serguey Shinder
In 2023 our sales director proposed a tool for managing quotes, a hosted service his team had been trialling for a month. It came to me for review, as anything that touches customer data does, and I spent three weeks on it. I asked for the supplier's security certifications, a data processing agreement, an exit plan, a description of how it would connect to our pricing, and a comparison with two alternatives. I raised fourteen questions. The sales team answered them slowly, the proposal missed the budget round, and it was cut.
Around the same time my own team proposed a hosted service for monitoring our servers. It held less customer data, but it needed broad access to almost every system we run. I read it in an afternoon, asked two questions and approved it.
I did not notice the difference. The sales director did, and said so in a meeting early in 2024, with some heat. IT, he said, reviewed other people's ideas until they died and waved its own through. I thought that was unfair, and because I thought it was unfair, I set out to prove it.
I went through every proposal I had reviewed in the previous two years. There were forty one. Eighteen came from my own department and twenty three from elsewhere. Seventeen of the eighteen had been approved, with a median of four days from submission to decision. Of the twenty three, eleven had been approved, with a median of nineteen days. On average I had asked my own team three questions and everybody else eleven. I could not find a difference in risk between the two groups that came close to explaining it.
He was right, and the uncomfortable part was that I had never once felt biased. Every question I put to the sales team was a reasonable question, and I could have defended any of them. What I had not done was ask the same questions of people I trusted, because I knew them, and knowing them felt like evidence. Rigour that I applied only to strangers was not a standard. It was a border.
What changed was mostly mechanical. Every proposal now gets the same written list of eighteen questions, whoever it comes from, and the answers are what get reviewed. Proposals from my own department are reviewed by somebody outside it, usually in finance. And I record the date each review starts and finishes, and the figures go into a quarterly report that the sales director, among others, receives.
The quote tool was approved in the summer of 2024, after answering the same eighteen questions as everybody else. Two proposals from my own team have been sent back since. One of them deserved it badly.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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