Maverick spend in large organisations is rarely rebellion.
It is usually a decision made under pressure: this path looks faster, clearer, or more predictable than going through procurement.
If bypass keeps happening in your organisation, the question is not whether stakeholders respect policy. It is whether your function makes engagement commercially worthwhile.
Picture this. A project lead needs a specialist consultant for an urgent programme with a hard deadline. She knows the supplier. She’s worked with them before. The scope is clear, the budget is approved, and the executive sponsor wants work to start next week.
She looks at the procurement process: intake form, vendor onboarding, three levels of approval, contract review, PO generation. Estimated elapsed time: four to six weeks.
She looks at the alternative: call the supplier, agree terms on a call, sign an engagement letter, start Monday.
She chooses Monday.
And it happened because, in that moment, procurement was friction, not help.
These seven patterns explain why that keeps happening, and what needs to change.
This sits alongside our work on the Strategic Framework for Reducing Maverick Spend , the 11 Stakeholder Archetypes , and Warning Signs Your Procurement Process Is Driving Bypass. Those articles examined stakeholder behaviour and structural process design. This one turns the lens inward.
1. Procurement’s Timelines Are Opaque
Speed matters. Predictability matters more.
In shared-services or centre-led models, requests often enter a workflow system and disappear from view. The internal team can see status. The stakeholder cannot.
From the outside, that feels like drift. And drift triggers control-seeking behaviour. Business units bypass procurement to regain certainty, the process may not be slow, but they can’t tell whether it’s moving at all.
Most enterprise procurement systems were configured around approvals and audit trails. Visibility was secondary. That design choice has cultural consequences: when stakeholders can’t see progress, they assume low priority.
When stakeholders can see movement, they plan around it. When they can’t, they work around it.
Opaque timelines are often the first friction point stakeholders encounter. But they’re not the only design problem.
2. Procurement’s Governance Model Is Built for Oversight, Not Adoption
A hiring manager needs to engage a recruitment firm, a $15k placement fee for a role that’s been vacant for two months. She opens the procurement portal and finds an intake form with 40 fields, half of them internal codes she’s never encountered. GL code. Category classification. CAPEX/OPEX split. Business unit hierarchy.
She guesses at three of them, leaves two blank, and submits.
It comes back: “Incomplete, please provide cost centre and category code.”
She’s thinking: this would take me 30 minutes to sort out, or I could call the recruiter directly and have candidates by Friday.
Most enterprise procurement environments prioritise control, auditability, and spend visibility. Few prioritise ease of engagement.
When intake forms require detailed internal data and approval chains run to five levels regardless of spend value, stakeholders weigh effort against perceived risk. If effort outweighs exposure, bypass follows.
In federated models, this spreads quickly. Small friction multiplied across thousands of transactions becomes cultural resistance.
This is a design problem, not a discipline problem.
And when the systems create friction, the language your team uses can either bridge that gap or widen it.
3. Your Function Speaks Procurement, Not Business
Does your team talk about sourcing events and compliance rates, or about margin impact, delivery certainty, and risk exposure?
Language signals alignment.
When procurement defaults to its own vocabulary, business leaders have to translate before they can engage. That creates distance. It makes the team look like technical support rather than a commercial partner.
This is a positioning issue.
There is a meaningful difference between “we’ll initiate a sourcing event for the SaaS category” and “we’ll help you find the right supplier and protect your budget.” The first describes a process. The second describes a benefit. Stakeholders engage with the second.
If procurement leaders consistently communicate in outcome terms, revenue protection, cash flow timing, cost stability, they get invited into strategic conversations earlier.
When procurement sounds internal, it is treated as internal.
Language affects when you’re involved, too. If stakeholders don’t see procurement as commercially relevant, they won’t think to bring you in until they’re forced to.
4. Procurement Enters Late, Then Focuses on What Should Have Happened
You are brought into a programme after supplier discussions have begun. The business case is advanced. The vendor is preferred.
Your team’s first instinct is to explain what should have occurred earlier.
From the business perspective, procurement has arrived to reset the clock.
In many decentralised organisations, this dynamic is learned. Previous early engagement may have introduced heavy governance, extended timelines, or shifted ownership away from the business. If that was the experience, late engagement is self-protection, not oversight.
Early involvement has to lead to better results, not more process.
If early engagement speeds things up, business units will change their behaviour. If it adds steps, they’ll keep waiting.
Late involvement is one symptom. But sometimes it reveals a deeper issue: the team doesn’t know enough about the business to add value at the early stage even when they are invited.
5. Procurement Team Lacks Deep Business Context
A programme director running a regulated digital transformation should not need to explain their compliance environment to procurement every time they engage. A construction manager should not need to walk their commercial lead through the difference between a design-and-construct contract and a managing contractor model.
Yet in many enterprise procurement functions, that’s the reality.
A generalist sourcing model struggles in complex enterprises.
Procurement may support digital transformation, capital works, regulated programmes, and operational services simultaneously. Each has different funding pressures, risk tolerances, and time horizons.
When advice is generic, the same sourcing methodology applied to a marketing technology platform as to a civil construction programme, stakeholders conclude that procurement understands buying, but not their business.
That makes procurement easier to ignore. And the effect builds: if procurement repeatedly asks for context that should already be known, stakeholders learn to work around the function rather than partner with it.
For leaders seeking to close this capability gap, the Academy of Procurement offers structured commercial and category management training, from foundational stakeholder influencing through to advanced programmes on enabling better business outcomes from the procurement process.
Shallow business knowledge erodes credibility. But nothing erodes it faster than poor commercial judgment when it matters most.
6. You Killed a Good Deal Over a Technicality
This is where procurement’s credibility is tested.
A commercially strong agreement is on the table. Competitive pricing. Delivery aligned to need. Supplier fit confirmed.
Negotiations stall over a clause that diverges from your template. Perhaps the liability cap is $500k rather than $750k on a $50k annual contract. Perhaps payment terms are 45 days rather than 30. Perhaps the termination wording is functionally equivalent but phrased differently.
Risk management is non-negotiable. Liability caps, indemnities, data protection, these are serious matters. But there is a difference between material risk and template purism.
If your team cannot clearly explain what happens if a disputed clause is invoked, the dollar exposure attached, and how likely that scenario actually is, then the negotiation has become procedural rather than commercial.
The business does not see the risk avoided. It sees the opportunity delayed.
Strong procurement leaders draw a clear line between issues that must be fixed, issues worth negotiating, and issues that are preferences. That discernment earns trust.
Judgment, not rigidity, is what senior stakeholders expect.
Every one of these patterns, opaque timelines, heavy governance, misaligned language, late involvement, shallow context, rigid negotiation, feeds a cumulative perception. And that perception shapes the final, most consequential question.
7. You Cannot Clearly State Procurement’s Commercial Value
At some point, a senior executive will ask: “Why does procurement need to be involved here?”
If the answer references policy, compliance, or process, the function looks administrative.
Senior leaders listen when you can show them money saved and risk avoided.
If the narrative is unclear, stakeholders will default to their own negotiation capability. Bypass is practical, not ideological.
When value is not visible, autonomy wins.
And this is why it matters in the context of everything above.
Each of the preceding six patterns chips away at procurement’s perceived value.
Opaque timelines signal inefficiency. Heavy governance signals bureaucracy. Internal language signals disconnection. Late involvement signals irrelevance. Shallow context signals misunderstanding. Rigid negotiation signals poor judgment.
By the time the executive asks “why involve procurement?”, the function has already given them six reasons not to.
The answer to that question is not better messaging. It is fixing the six things that undermined the message in the first place.
A Note on Procurement’s Structure: Centralised vs. Federated Models
These seven patterns play out differently depending on how procurement is organised.
In a centralised model, friction concentrates.
Every stakeholder hits the same bottleneck, the same opaque queue, the same 40-field form, the same contract review timeline. The upside is that problems are visible and fixable in one place. The downside is that when the centre is slow or rigid, the entire organisation feels it. Bypass is obvious and often escalated.
In a federated model, friction diffuses.
Each business unit develops its own workarounds, its own preferred suppliers, its own informal procurement processes. Bypass is quieter, harder to detect, and more culturally embedded. By the time leadership notices the pattern, it’s normalised.
Shared services sit somewhere between the two, and can amplify either clarity or confusion depending on how processes are designed. A well-configured shared service makes the right path obvious. A poorly configured one adds a layer of distance between the stakeholder and anyone who can actually help.
The implication: the fixes are the same, but the diagnosis differs. Centralised teams should look for concentrated failure points. Federated teams should look for distributed workarounds that have become invisible.
What to Do Next
You do not need to address all seven at once.
This week: Ask three senior stakeholders where procurement creates the most friction. Listen without defending.
This month: Select one structural issue, language, visibility, governance design, capability, and correct it fully rather than partially.
This quarter: Measure behavioural change. Has early engagement increased? Has bypass reduced in that category? Has executive sentiment shifted?
Not sure which of these patterns are active in your organisation?
Comprara’s Procurement Maturity Assessment benchmarks your function against enterprise best practice across governance, stakeholder engagement, capability, and commercial impact. It identifies where structural redesign will have the greatest effect, and gives you a prioritised roadmap to get there.
Reducing bypass is not about enforcement.
It is about building a function that business leaders choose to involve, because doing so improves their results.
