You Cannot Build Your Way Out of a Process Problem

So Stop Trying

I once watched a client spend eight weeks in vendor demos.

Eight weeks. Back to back meetings. Evaluation scorecards. Security reviews. Stakeholder presentations. The whole thing.

And then we got on a call with their CMO and CIO on a Friday afternoon and they said the words I have heard more times than I can count:

"We think we want to build something."

Poof. Eight weeks, suddenly gone.

Now look, I am not here to tell you that building is always the wrong call. Sometimes it is the right call.

But here is what I can tell you with absolute certainty after doing this for twenty years: the build vs. buy decision is almost always the wrong first question. And the companies that jump straight to it are the ones that end up in trouble.

Here is what actually happened

The reason that client spent eight weeks looking at vendors and then decided to build was not because they suddenly discovered that no vendor could meet their needs.

It was because nobody had done the hard work of understanding what their needs actually were before the demos started.

So they sat through presentation after presentation, watching platforms that were almost right but not quite right, because they were measuring against a moving target.

Every demo surfaced a new requirement. Every stakeholder meeting added a new constraint. By week eight, the gap between what they thought they needed and what any vendor could offer had grown wide enough that building felt like the only option left.

This is, ultimately, a process problem. And you cannot build your way out of a process problem.

The question to ask first

Everyone wants to talk about the technology. Which platform? Which vendor? Which AI tool? Build or buy?

And I get it, because the technology is exciting and the process work is not. Nobody puts "we redesigned our workflows for three months" in a press release.

But if you do not know how your business actually operates today, including all the workarounds, the tribal knowledge, the things that only happen on Tuesdays when it rains, you are not ready to make a technology decision. You are not even close.

What you are ready to do is spend a lot of money finding out the hard way.

I talk about this constantly with my clients, and I will say it here too. Your bad data is still going to be bad data after you implement the platform.

Your broken process is still going to be broken after you go live. Your siloed teams are still going to be siloed after the kickoff. Technology does not fix those things. It exposes them. Loudly. Usually, at the worst possible moment.

The build vs. buy question is a trap

Here is what I mean. When a leadership team starts asking build vs. buy, they are already in the wrong conversation. They are debating the solution before they have diagnosed the problem.

Which, of course, makes it impossible to prescribe the right solution. These transformations are doomed from the start.

The right first question is not build or buy. It is: do we actually understand our process well enough to know what we are solving for? And the honest answer, for most of the organizations I walk into, is no.

Not because they are not smart or don’t care, but because nobody has ever sat down with the people who actually do the work and mapped out what is really happening.

That’s what you have to do: pull the thread, and unravel the 20 years of bad knitting on the proverbial sweater.

If you do not deal with it before you make your technology decision, it will absolutely deal with you after.

What to do instead

Before you look at a single vendor, build a single requirements document, or schedule a single demo. Do this:

Map your actual process. Not the one in the deck, but the one that happens every day.

Talk to the people doing the work, and find the workarounds, dependencies. Find the things that only three people in the company know how to do and what happens when those three people are on vacation at the same time.

Then, and only then, ask whether you need to buy something, build something, or whether the real answer is that you need to fix your process first before any technology is going to help you.

That conversation is uncomfortable. It takes longer than a vendor demo. It does not have a flashy slide deck. But it is the conversation that determines whether your transformation succeeds or becomes another cautionary tale.

If any of this sounds familiar, talk to me

This is exactly where we start. Not with the technology, but with the process, the people, and the real picture of where your business is today. Until you have that, you are not ready to make the decisions that actually matter.

Book a call with us, and let's figure out where you actually are before we talk about where you want to go.