If you’ve worked in procurement for more than a week, you’ve lived this scene:
A department urgently needs something.
They’ve already spoken to the supplier, negotiated terms, maybe even shaken hands on it.
Then, almost as an afterthought, they come to you. Not for advice. Not for strategy. Just to “raise the PO.”
You explain (again) that early involvement ensures compliance, manages risk, and actually saves money. They nod politely. Then they do it again next month.
And here’s where it gets interesting. You’ve got two levers to pull: enforce the process harder or build better relationships.
Tighten the rules or earn the trust.
The trouble is that both approaches seem to backfire. Enforce too rigidly, and stakeholders double down on finding creative workarounds. Relax too much, and you’re presiding over chaos whilst vendors receive mixed messages and your risk profile balloons.
What Is Maverick Spending? Understanding Off-Contract Procurement
A recent thread on Reddit (r/Procurement) crystallised this dilemma perfectly. A procurement lead described exactly this dynamic, and the responses were telling. Some advocated strict control: “Deny every licence without a signature.” Others suggested relationship-building: “Create a deck explaining what procurement actually does.” Both camps were convinced they were right.
The truth? They both are. And they’re both wrong.
Because the real answer isn’t choosing between relationship and process. It’s understanding where you currently sit on both dimensions, and why that position is either inviting the behaviour you’re seeing or preventing it.
Why Stakeholders Bypass Procurement Processes
Most procurement dysfunctions can be mapped onto a simple grid. On one axis, you’ve got your relationship focus: how embedded, trusted, and collaborative you are with internal stakeholders. On the other, your process focus: how structured, governed, and enforceable your systems are.
The Two Root Causes of Maverick Spending: Process Complexity vs Relationship Gaps
Understanding the Relationship-Process Matrix in Procurement
Axis 1: Relationship Focus
- Low means you’re transactional, distant, reactive. You show up when summoned. You’re the department people remember exists when they need a PO number.
- High means you’re a trusted adviser, embedded in business planning, collaborative from day one. You’re in the room when decisions are being made, not afterwards when they need processing.
Axis 2: Process Focus
- Low means things are ad hoc, flexible to the point of inconsistent. Every request is treated as a special case. Nothing’s documented. Good luck finding last year’s contract.
- High means you’ve got structure, governance, and enforceability. Clear policies. Defined approval thresholds. Consequences for non-compliance. The boring stuff that actually works.
The Four Procurement Quadrants Explained
Here’s what makes this model useful: the extremes create the most friction.
- High relationship, low process? You’re everyone’s mate, but you’re not actually protecting the business from anything.
- Low relationship, high process? You’re the compliance team everyone routes around.
- Low on both? You’re practically invisible (we won’t dwell on this quadrant, because if you’re operating there, you’ve got more fundamental problems to solve first).
- The sustainable position lives in the top-right quadrant. Strong relationships and strong process. Trust and structure.
It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but here’s the challenge: in our experience working with procurement teams across different sectors, most are camped out in one corner, wondering why the other dimension keeps causing them problems.
The question isn’t whether you need relationships or process. It’s which one you’ve been neglecting whilst obsessing over the other.
High-Relationship, Low-Process Procurement: When Being Helpful Creates Compliance Issues
This is procurement as the friendly facilitator.
You prioritise trust, responsiveness, and goodwill above all else. Rules exist, technically, but they’re more like guidelines. Suggestions, really. Because the real currency here is relationships. When someone needs an exception, you make it happen. When urgency strikes, you flex. The unofficial motto? “Let’s help the business get what it needs.”
It’s a seductive quadrant to operate in. People like you. They invite you to meetings. They describe you as “pragmatic” rather than “bureaucratic.” And there’s genuine value in that.
What High-Relationship Procurement Requires From Your Team
But here’s what the job posting didn’t mention: high emotional labour, constantly. You’re the person who makes things work through force of personality and availability. Strong interpersonal skills aren’t a nice-to-have, they’re the load-bearing pillar of your entire operating model. You absorb ambiguity, manage competing demands, and smooth over inconsistencies through sheer relational capital.
You’re always on. Because when you’re the exception-maker, every exception requires you personally.
The upside is real. Stakeholders genuinely like working with you. You get looped in early, sometimes. Not always, but more often than teams operating purely on policy enforcement. Fewer confrontations. More informal influence. You’re solving problems before they become official problems, and that feels productive.
The Hidden Costs of Flexible Procurement Processes
Until it doesn’t. Because here’s the thing about inconsistency: it creates confusion about what the actual rules are. Every exception you grant becomes someone else’s precedent. Suppliers start receiving mixed messages because different stakeholders have negotiated different things, and there’s no central record of who promised what.
Slowly, then suddenly, procurement becomes optional. Not officially, of course. But functionally. Because if the rules bend whenever someone pushes, people learn to push. And when everything’s negotiable, nothing’s enforceable.
The risk and compliance issues don’t disappear. They just surface later, when they’re more expensive to fix. Often right when the friendly relationship you’ve built gets tested by having to say, “Actually, we can’t do that anymore.”
3 Warning Signs Your Procurement Team Is Too Relationship-Focused
- Say “yes” quickly, but renegotiate later. The immediate win feels good. The cleanup work happens quietly, later, often just with you and a spreadsheet at 7pm.
- Rely on personal credibility over policy. Your influence comes from being you, not from your role. Which works brilliantly until you’re unavailable. Then things start to unravel.
- Handle issues privately instead of escalating. You pride yourself on resolving things informally. Which means the business never quite learns what proper escalation looks like, and you’re constantly firefighting.
The challenge with this quadrant: it runs on you. Not on systems. Not on process. On your goodwill, your availability, your willingness to stretch. And the moment you can’t stretch anymore, or you’re not there, everyone discovers that what felt like a well-oiled machine was actually just you, holding it together through constant personal effort.
High-Process, Low-Relationship Procurement: When Strict Controls Drive Stakeholder Workarounds
This is procurement as the gatekeeper. You lead with policy, gates, and controls. There’s a process for everything, and the process is non-negotiable. Clear rules. Defined escalation paths. Approval thresholds documented to the decimal point. When someone asks for an exception, the answer is usually no, and definitely not without following steps A through F first.
It’s the quadrant that looks brilliant on paper. Literally. Your policies are documented. Your compliance is measurable. Your audit trail is impeccable. This is procurement as it should be, according to every textbook and framework.
What High-Process Procurement Actually Requires
But here’s what it actually requires:
Executive backing, the kind that holds when things get uncomfortable. Strong alignment with finance, because you’re going to need them when you start blocking payments. A genuine willingness to be unpopular, not just tolerance for it, but acceptance that being liked is not the job. And discipline. Relentless, exhausting discipline in enforcement, because the moment you make one exception, the entire edifice wobbles.
The upside is clarity.
Everyone knows where they stand. Compliance is measurable and, mostly, achieved. Grey areas are eliminated through detailed policy. Your audit defence is watertight. You can point to the documentation and say, “This is the rule, this is what happened, here’s the evidence.”
Short-term friction is inevitable, but that’s fine. That’s the price of control.
When “No PO, No Pay” Policies Backfire
Except the friction doesn’t stay short-term. It becomes the permanent state. Because whilst you’ve got control, you’ve lost something more valuable: cooperation.
Procurement becomes “the department that slows things down.” The one that blocks. The bottleneck. And here’s the paradox: you’re not wrong to enforce the process. The process is good. The problem is that when people don’t understand why it exists, enforcement alone rarely changes behaviour.
So, they work around you. Not all at once, but gradually. They engage suppliers first, get everything agreed, then present you with a fait accompli. “We just need you to raise the PO.” Urgency becomes weaponised. Every request is critical, every timeline is impossible, every delay is costing the business millions.
And the real challenge?
Your influence erodes despite your authority. You’ve got the formal power to say no, but you’re often saying it to decisions that have already been made in rooms you weren’t invited to. You’re controlling the paperwork whilst the actual procurement happens without you.
3 Signs Your Procurement Process Is Driving Shadow Procurement
- Enforce “no PO, no pay” strictly. It’s the nuclear option, and you use it. Vendors don’t get paid without proper process. Which works, until a critical supplier relationship suffers because your stakeholder promised them something you’re now blocking.
- Escalate issues early and formally. Someone breaks the rules, you escalate. Every time. Consistently. Which means your leadership’s inbox is full of procurement escalations, and eventually the signal-to-noise ratio becomes a problem.
- Optimise for consistency over speed. Every request gets the same treatment. Fair is good. But fair can also mean equally slow for everyone, including the genuinely urgent requests that probably did need faster handling.
The paradox of this quadrant is that you’re technically winning whilst practically losing. The process is being followed, the boxes are being ticked, but the real procurement decisions are happening in conversations you’re not part of. You’ve got control of the transaction whilst losing influence over the strategy.
And when workarounds do happen, which they will, you’ve got no relationship capital to fall back on. Just the policy. Which doesn’t carry as much weight as you’d hope when trust is absent.
Strategic Procurement: Balancing Stakeholder Relationships and Process Controls
What High-Performing Procurement Teams Do Differently
The top-right quadrant isn’t about perfection. It’s not about being universally loved whilst running an airtight compliance regime. It’s about something more subtle and more useful: being predictably helpful within a clear framework.
What this actually looks like: clear process plus visible responsiveness. People know the rules, and they also know you’ll help them navigate those rules quickly. Exceptions still happen, because the real world is messy, but they’re structured rather than improvised. There’s a defined path for “this genuinely doesn’t fit the standard process,” and it doesn’t require begging or creative interpretation.
Procurement becomes both predictable and human. Stakeholders know what to expect, and what they expect is someone who’ll work with them, not against them. When suppliers interact with your organisation, they get one commercial voice, not five different people all claiming to speak for the business with contradictory messages.
It’s the difference between “I can’t do that, policy says no” and “Here’s what policy allows, here’s why it exists, and here’s how we solve your actual problem within it.” Same outcome sometimes, completely different relationship.
Reducing Maverick Spend Through Better Procurement Engagement
We’ve seen this work particularly well in technology companies making the transition from start-up chaos to scale-up governance. One procurement team we worked with reduced maverick spend by 40% in twelve months, not by adding more controls, but by making the approved process faster and more transparent than the workaround. Stakeholders stopped going direct to suppliers because involving procurement early actually saved them time.
5 Questions to Assess Your Procurement Approach
The question isn’t whether you’ve arrived at this quadrant. It’s whether you’re honestly moving towards it.
Try these on:
- Do stakeholders call us early, or only when stuck? If your phone only rings when something’s gone wrong or they need a PO number, you’re in the cleanup operation rather than the planning conversation.
- Are our processes clear to non-procurement people? Not “do we have documentation,” because everyone has documentation. Can someone from marketing or operations actually understand what’s required without needing to book a meeting with you to decode it?
- Where do we rely on goodwill instead of structure? Be honest. What currently works because you’re personally making it work? What breaks when you’re on leave? That’s where your relationship focus is compensating for missing process.
- Where do we hide behind policy instead of solving problems? The flip side. Where are you saying “that’s the rule” when what you really mean is “I don’t want to deal with this” or “I don’t have the authority to make an exception”? That’s where your process focus is compensating for missing relationships.
- If we enforced every rule tomorrow, who would support us? Not tolerate. Support. Actively back you up when someone complains. If the answer is “maybe finance, probably nobody else,” then you haven’t built the relationship foundation that makes strong process sustainable.
Most teams can answer these questions quickly, because they know exactly where they’re weak. The hard bit isn’t diagnosis. It’s admitting that the dimension you’ve been neglecting is the one causing most of your problems.
High relationship with low process feels efficient right up until it becomes chaos. High process with low relationship feels rigorous right up until everyone routes around you. Both together? That’s the only version that actually scales without you personally holding it together or constantly fighting with the business.
It’s harder to build. It requires investment in both dimensions simultaneously. But it’s the only quadrant where procurement stops being either the helpful pushover or the officious blocker, and becomes what it should be: a function the business actively chooses to involve because it makes their lives better, not because policy forces them to.
Building both relationship and process capabilities requires specific skills. Academy of Procurement’s Stakeholder Influencing and Management course equips procurement teams with practical tools for securing stakeholder participation while maintaining governance. The two-day workshop covers facilitation techniques, communication strategies, and how to lead stakeholders through the procurement process in a way that builds trust without compromising compliance.
Adapting Your Procurement Strategy to Organizational Risk and Culture
Why One-Size-Fits-All Procurement Frameworks Fail
Here’s the bit nobody wants to hear: there is no universal “best” model. No perfect ratio of relationship to process that works everywhere. No template you can copy from a company three times your size and expect the same results.
Because every organisation has a different risk tolerance. Some businesses genuinely can’t afford a single compliance failure. Others would rather apologise later than ask permission now, and they’re not wrong, they’re just optimising for different things.
Every organisation has different executive maturity around procurement. Some leadership teams genuinely understand strategic sourcing and want procurement embedded early. Others view you as the people who handle the admin after the real decisions are made. You can educate them, but you can’t fundamentally rewire how they see the function overnight.
And every organisation has a different urgency culture. In some places, “urgent” means “we’ve got three weeks, but let’s get ahead of it.” In others, it means “the contract was supposed to be signed yesterday and someone’s going to get shouted at.” Both cultures think they’re normal. Neither is changing.
Understanding your organisation’s unique position across these dimensions often requires an external perspective. Comprara works with procurement teams to objectively assess where you currently sit, identify which dimension is creating the most friction, and develop practical strategies to move towards sustainable high-performance procurement. Sometimes the most valuable insight is simply seeing your function as your stakeholders see it.
Which means the right answer for your team isn’t in this article, or any article. It’s in the specific combination of your organisation’s risk appetite, your leadership’s expectations, and your stakeholders’ actual behaviour patterns. Not what they say in the policy document. What they actually do when nobody’s watching.
The useful bit isn’t picking the perfect quadrant. It’s honestly assessing which one you’re currently in, understanding why you’re getting the behaviour you’re getting, and deciding whether that’s serving the business or just serving the process. Sometimes the most strategic thing procurement can do is admit it’s been optimising for the wrong variable. But it’s considerably more valuable than another perfectly documented process that everyone ignores.
Procurement Maturity Assessment: Benchmark Your Team’s Performance
Want to understand where your team actually sits?
Our Procurement Maturity Assessment is a professional health check for teams stuck in the reactive-to-strategic transition. It’s a three-step process that assesses your current position across 20 areas (not just relationship and process, but technology, team capability, and risk exposure), prioritises which improvements will deliver the biggest impact, and provides a data-backed roadmap to get there.
What you get: benchmark data showing exactly where you stand against industry leaders, identification of vulnerabilities before they become actual problems, and the business case you need to justify budget, headcount, or new systems to leadership.
Because knowing you’ve got a problem is useful. Knowing exactly which problem you’ve got, and having the data to fix it, is what shifts procurement from cost centre to strategic function.
Contact Comprara to start the conversation.
From Procurement Theory to Practice: Handling Real Stakeholder Resistance
Here’s the part where we acknowledge that understanding the 2×2 doesn’t magically fix your problems by Monday morning. Models are useful for diagnosis. They’re less useful for the actual moment when someone from sales is standing in your office (or, let’s be honest, your Teams chat) insisting they need a vendor set up by tomorrow because they’ve already promised the client.
Handling these moments well requires more than just knowing your policy handbook. It requires practical facilitation and communication skills. Academy of Procurement’s Communications Skills and Conflict Resolution Skills courses provide procurement professionals with techniques to navigate these high-pressure conversations while maintaining relationships and upholding process.
What the model does is show you why you’re getting the behaviour you’re getting. If you’re camped in the high-process, low-relationship quadrant wondering why people keep finding workarounds, well, now you know. If you’re in the high-relationship, low-process quadrant exhausted from being everyone’s fixer, you can see why that’s unsustainable.
Moving quadrants requires deliberate work on both dimensions. Building relationships without tightening process just scales your chaos. Implementing process without building relationships just scales your resistance. Both together, gradually, is what shifts procurement from being seen as optional to being seen as essential.
But even when you’ve got the model right, even when you’re operating in that sweet spot of high relationship and high process, you’ve still got to deal with actual human beings who have their own motivations, pressures, and creative interpretations of what “urgent” means.
Which brings us to the tactical, transactional reality: the specific types of people who bypass procurement, why they do it, and how to handle each one without either caving in completely or burning bridges you’ll need later.
Coming Next: Managing 11 Types of Stakeholders Who Create Maverick Spend (With Tactics That Work)
Coming soon, we’ll meet the cast of characters every procurement professional knows intimately. And a few others you’ll recognise immediately from your own organisation.
Each type requires a different approach. One-size-fits-all responses are how you end up either ignored or routed around. Understanding who you’re dealing with, what they’re optimising for, and which levers actually work on them is what separates procurement teams who command respect from those who command resentment.
Stay tuned. It gets tactical.
