Teams at this stage often underestimate how exposed the commitment has become.

Common patterns include comparing options without a shared or explicit decision framework, which makes it hard to explain why one option is preferred; focusing on solution features rather than the decision rationale, particularly when the investment case needs to be defended to investment decision-makers who are not domain experts; discovering late that the business case assumptions are contested, either internally or by finance and the board; and moving to commitment before the organisational conditions for success have been established, which creates the risk of approval followed by stall.

Under scrutiny from finance, leadership, procurement, or the board, these gaps become visible quickly. When that happens, decisions stall, credibility erodes, or momentum is lost at exactly the point it matters most.

The assumption most practitioners at this stage are operating on is that the hard work is behind them. The diagnosis has been made, the direction is set, the business case has been approved. What remains is execution: selecting the right vendor or solution and getting implementation underway.

The evidence suggests this is precisely the stage where the most consequential assumptions go untested.

By the time an organisation reaches formal vendor selection, the people with the most detailed knowledge of the plan have a stake in it. The internal team has invested months of work. The vendor has invested in the relationship. The consultant has shaped the scope. In those conditions, the plan rarely gets pressure-tested by someone who brings both relevant experience and genuine independence and the questions that would be cheap to answer now become expensive to discover six months into implementation.

The specific things that tend to go wrong at this stage are not technical. They are the requirements that were defined around the vendor's architecture rather than the organisation's actual decision needs; the data migration that inherits the quality problems of the system it replaces; and the implementation scope that was managed by cutting rather than designing, leaving the capabilities that would have justified the investment deferred as non-essential.

BPC's outside-in view at this stage comes from practitioners who have been through comparable vendor selection and commitment decisions in comparable organisations. Tell us about your context and we can find the most relevant comparisons.