The CFO’s email arrived on a Thursday: the data-platform project, quoted at 40 lakh, had crossed 68 and was still moving. By the time I was asked to look at it, the client had already fired one vendor contact and drafted a stern letter to the account director. They wanted to know who had lied. The uncomfortable answer, once we laid the paperwork on the table, was that nobody had. The IT project budget blowout had been fully visible on day zero — written into three vendor quotes that had each answered a different question. This is the story of that diagnosis, because I have since run it at a dozen companies and found the same disease every time.
The symptom: overruns that nobody can locate
Classic presentation: the project is over budget, yet every change order is individually reasonable. The vendor can defend each invoice. The internal team can defend each request. Finance keeps asking which single decision caused the overrun, and the honest reply is none of them — which satisfies no one. When an overrun has no author, the cause almost always predates the contract.
The usual misdiagnoses
Three explanations get reached for first, and all three miss. “The vendor low-balled us.” Sometimes true, but in our Thursday case the vendor’s quote was internally consistent; it simply excluded data cleansing, visibly, on page six. “Our team keeps changing scope.” Also partly true, but the changes were discoveries, not whims — things the project always needed that no quote had priced. “We chose badly; the other bidder would have been better.” Unknowable, because the other bids priced different assumptions. That last sentence is the tell. If you cannot reconstruct, even in hindsight, what the losing bids would have cost for the delivered scope, your selection was never a comparison. It was a coin toss with paperwork.
The actual disease: incomparable quotes
Here is what the day-zero table looked like once we rebuilt it. Vendor A: 40 lakh, cleansing excluded, client-side testing assumed. Vendor B: 55 lakh, cleansing included, managed testing, longer timeline. Vendor C: 47 lakh, silent on both. The company had compared 40, 55, and 47 as if they were the same quantity and congratulated itself on choosing the lowest. The 28-lakh overrun was, almost to the rupee, the cost of the exclusions and silences in the winning quote — work the project required regardless of who performed it.
No one wrote a single requirement document. Each vendor was briefed by a different manager on a different call. The quotes could not have been comparable, because the questions were not identical. That is the whole pathology: the budget did not blow up in month six; it was never whole.
The treatment: requirement first, bids against it, comparison as a stage
The fix is procedural and almost embarrassingly simple, and the clearest working model of it I can point clients to sits outside IT entirely. MyHospitalNow, a healthcare marketplace built on competing treatment estimates, makes a patient write the requirement once; the platform checks the submission, hospitals bid against that single document, and the patient examines the bids together — price shown with each hospital’s particulars and location, the platform’s own trust markers alongside — before approving anyone. Asking costs the patient nothing, which the site confirms in plain words. Transplant that spine into IT procurement and the disease cannot take hold: one written specification, every vendor answering it, exclusions forced into daylight, and a comparison stage that happens on paper before a signature exists.
For the Thursday client we rewrote the process in a week. A two-page specification, five vendors, identical distribution, and a response template that required itemised pricing, named staff, and an explicit exclusions section. The responses that came back disagreed about money — usefully, legibly, for stated reasons. For teams buying at scale, the same discipline can be tooled up through the current generation of eProcurement platforms, but the tool is optional. The document is not.
Keeping the patient healthy
Three maintenance habits prevent relapse. First, never let a verbal briefing substitute for the written one; if it is not in the specification, it is not in any quote, and you will buy it later at change-order prices. Second, evaluate on evidence rather than rapport — the same principle argued in the case for evidence-led software selection applies with more force when the product is people. Third, carry the comparison table into the contract: the winning bid’s inclusions and exclusions should appear verbatim in the agreement, where modern contract-lifecycle tooling can keep them visible for the life of the engagement instead of buried in a PDF nobody reopens.
The discharge summary
One caution before the happy ending: the specification must be frozen while bids are open. If a manager phones a favoured vendor with extra context mid-tender, the incomparability creeps straight back in through the side door. Clarifications are fine — but they go to every bidder, in writing, as amendments to the one document.
The client’s next project — similar size, same industry — landed within four percent of its quote. Nothing about the vendors changed; the question did. When budgets blow up without an author, stop hunting for the liar and audit the day the numbers were gathered. If the quotes answered different questions, the overrun was congenital. Write one requirement, make every bidder answer it, compare before committing — the sequence a patient now gets as a product on MyHospitalNow is available to any IT buyer with a blank document and a stubborn streak. The disease is incomparability. The cure is a page of writing. I have never seen a cheaper one in this profession.