™How We Work · 5 min
Buying strategy like software: scope, SLA, refund
Traditional strategy services have resisted procurement discipline for decades. A computational core makes scope, SLA, and refund possible – and the procurement talk worth having.
Procurement knows how to buy software. There's a defined scope, a service-level agreement, measurable acceptance criteria, and recourse if it underdelivers. Traditional strategy work has historically escaped all of this. It's sold on reputation and relationship, scoped loosely, measured never, and refunded essentially as a matter of goodwill. Procurement teams have learned to treat it as an unavoidable exception to their own discipline.
That exception existed for a structural reason: traditional advice had no objective measure of success, so there was nothing concrete to write an SLA against. If the deliverable is judgment in a slide deck, "did it work?" has no answer the contract can reference.
A computational core changes that. When a recommendation is produced by an optimisation engine, benchmarked against your incumbent method, and shipped with its constraints and sensitivities, success becomes measurable – which means it becomes contractible. quaStrat™ engagements can therefore carry the things procurement expects from software: a fixed scope, defined acceptance criteria, support commitments through the licence period, and a money-back POC that puts the fee at risk against a benchmark.
This isn't about turning strategy into a commodity. The thinking, the formulation, the domain judgment remain demanding and bespoke. It's about making the buying of strategy rational – letting you apply the same scope-SLA-refund discipline to a board-level decision that you'd apply to any serious enterprise purchase. The procurement conversation traditional strategy firms always resisted is finally one worth having.