The consultants left. The vendor got blamed. And the practitioner who saw it coming? They’re still there — wondering if anyone’s coming back.
The Question No One Answers
What happens after the consultants leave?
Not during the engagement, when the conference rooms are full and the Gantt charts are color-coded and everyone’s aligned on the “transformation roadmap.” Not during go-live, when the champagne corks pop and the vendor takes a victory lap.
After.
When the consultants pack up their laptops and move to the next client. When the implementation partner’s contract expires. When the ERP goes live — or doesn’t — and suddenly the organization has to actually run the thing they just spent $10 million buying.
What happens to the practitioners left holding the bag?
I’ve been asking that question for 30 years. And I keep getting the same answer: abandonment.
September 2008: The Call from Georgia
My phone rang in September 2008. On the other end was a Category Manager at the State of Georgia named Billy Gilbert.
Billy had a problem. A major consulting engagement had just ended. The consultants had done their work — requirements gathered, recommendations delivered, contracts negotiated — and then they were gone. Moved on to the next client, the next engagement, the next billable project.
Billy and his team were left in a “what’s next” holding pattern.
“Now what?”
That was the question underneath the question. The consultants had come in, done their thing, and left. But no one had planned for what came next. No knowledge transfer. No capability building. No answer to the obvious follow-up: How do we actually sustain this?
So Billy reached out to me — a blogger in Canada he’d never met — because there was no one else.
Think about that. A state government employee, managing millions in public spend, had to seek mentorship from a stranger online because the consulting contract didn’t include the clause “make sure the client can survive without us.”
A few months later, Billy wrote me a LinkedIn recommendation. The words still hit:
The Abandonment Gap
Billy’s situation wasn’t unique. It was — and is — the norm.
Over the past three decades, a pattern has emerged that I call the Abandonment Gap:
- Consulting industry revenues have nearly doubled since 1995
- Implementation success rates have declined — from roughly 50% in the ERP era to as low as 25% for GenAI pilots today
- Practitioner feelings of abandonment have skyrocketed — peaking now, in the AI era, as organizations pursue transformation without investing in the people expected to sustain it
The math doesn’t work. We’re spending more on consultants while getting worse results and leaving practitioners more stranded than ever.
Why? Because the consulting model is designed to end. Engagements have scopes, timelines, and off-ramps. But organizational capability doesn’t work that way. It requires sustained investment, continuous development, and institutional commitment.
None of which appear on a consulting contract.
The Data: 30 Years of Documented Abandonment
This isn’t anecdote. It’s pattern.
The Blame Inversion
A study by Mosaic Project Services found that 76% of project failure causes fall under executive and general management — not project management, not practitioners, not vendors. Only 7 of 29 commonly cited failure reasons fall exclusively in the practitioner’s realm.
Yet when projects fail, who gets blamed? The project manager. The implementation team. The vendor. The consultants. Anyone except the executives who approved an under-resourced initiative without a readiness assessment.
W. Edwards Deming said it decades ago: 95% of problems in business are caused by systems and processes. Only 5% are caused by people.
We’ve spent 30 years ignoring that ratio.
The Burnout Epidemic
The numbers are staggering:
- 55% of procurement teams are experiencing greater burnout than previous years (ProcureAbility, 2024)
- ~20% of buyers are planning to leave their roles due to stress and lack of recognition (CIPS/Skills Dynamic)
- 70%+ of CPOs reported difficulty attracting talent over the past 12 months (Deloitte, 2023)
- 86% of procurement professionals saw their workload increase while resources decreased (DeepStream, 2022)
- 99% of supply chain professionals are concerned about high turnover due to pressurized conditions (Skills Dynamic)
And here’s the kicker: Only 10% of CPOs believe their teams have the skills to deliver their strategy (Deloitte, 2023).
Ten percent.
So 90% of CPOs know their teams aren’t equipped to succeed — and what do organizations do? Cut training budgets. Lean out departments. Ask one person to do the work of three.
Then blame them when it falls apart.
The Leaning Out
During the Great Recession, procurement departments became targets for “cost savings” — which meant headcount reduction. Teams of three to five were cut to one.
When healthier economic times returned, those resources were never restored. Departmental growth didn’t keep pace with company growth. The work expanded; the teams didn’t.
Today, the average procurement professional is doing the work of two to three people. They don’t have time to “stay on top of” their categories — they barely have time to get contracts out the door. The deep knowledge, the supplier relationships, the strategic thinking? Gone. There’s no bandwidth left.
And when a transformation initiative lands on their desk — an ERP implementation, an AI deployment, a “digital transformation” — they’re expected to absorb it on top of everything else.
The Pattern: Authority Down, Blame Up
Here’s why abandonment persists: the system is designed to protect decision-makers, not practitioners.
- The board approves the investment, sets the timeline, cuts the change management budget
- The C-suite demands results without providing resources
- The CPO knows the team isn’t ready but can’t get buy-in for readiness investment
- The practitioners see the gaps, raise concerns, and get “the look”
- The vendors and consultants deliver what was contracted and move on
When the initiative fails:
- The board approves the next initiative
- The C-suite blames execution
- The CPO takes the heat
- The practitioners are left to clean up the mess
- The vendors become the scapegoat
Authority flows down. Blame flows up. And the practitioners — the ones who actually have to make things work — are abandoned at every stage.
January 2025: The Pattern Repeats
I’m working with a practitioner right now. Let’s call her “D.”
D is a Director of Purchasing at a mid-market company. Her organization just came off a recent failed initiative — no post-mortem, no lessons learned, no readiness assessment. Now they’re launching an ERP transformation.
D sees everything. She knows the organization isn’t ready. She’s raised concerns — diplomatically, professionally, with documentation. She’s pushed for a Phase 0 readiness assessment. She’s challenged the consulting firm’s “Change Management” survey as insufficient.
And she keeps getting “the look.”
About a month ago, D sent me an email. She’s still fighting. Still pushing. Still documenting. But buried in the update was this line:
“I want you to know I appreciate your advice and counsel, and I hope to be calling you soon to implement a Phase 0 initiative.”
She’s bracing for the moment when she has to decide: stay and accept the suboptimal status quo, or leave.
That’s the choice practitioners face when organizations abandon them. Brittany Thomas, a procurement strategist I respect, named it perfectly:
“My biggest pet peeve is how the frustrated expert typically gets villainized, even though they are typically the ones that care the most about it succeeding. Often these are the high performing, high potential employees that end up in the position of either having to accept a new, suboptimal status quo created by the failed transformation or leave. Both are damaging.”
Both are damaging. And both happen quietly, invisibly, while the organization moves on to the next initiative.
The Hidden Cost
When practitioners leave — or stay and disengage — organizations lose something they can never recover: institutional memory.
The practitioner who knows where the bodies are buried. Who remembers why the last three initiatives failed. Who can tell you which suppliers actually deliver and which ones just talk a good game. Who understands the real processes, not the ones documented in the policy manual.
That knowledge walks out the door every time an organization abandons a practitioner. And no consulting engagement can replace it.
This is the hidden cost of the Abandonment Gap. Not just burnout. Not just turnover. The systematic erosion of the organizational capability required to succeed at transformation.
You can’t implement AI if you’ve driven out everyone who understands the business well enough to govern it.
Billy Made It. How Many Others Didn’t?
Here’s the thing about Billy Gilbert: he’s still there.
Twenty years later, he’s a Category Manager at the State of Georgia, managing $250 million in enterprise spend. He built national contracts for transit buses and school buses. He figured it out.
But Billy didn’t have to make it alone, nor do you.
Billy is the 20% who survive and thrive.
What about the 80% who don’t?
They’re not much different than Billy. They’re not less committed. They just had less luck — fewer external resources, fewer mentors willing to give them the time they needed, and therefore fewer options when the consultancies left them stranded.
They burned out. They left. They disengaged. They became the turnover statistics we cite without ever connecting to the governance decisions that caused them.
The Question I Keep Asking
What happens after the consultants leave?
In 2008, Billy Gilbert called me because no one else was there.
In 2025, D is pushing for Phase 0 because she knows the organization isn’t ready — and wondering if anyone will listen before it’s too late.
The technology changed. The ERP vendors changed. The buzzwords changed — from “digital transformation” to “AI-powered automation” to “agentic systems.”
The abandonment didn’t change.
We’re still leaving practitioners to figure it out alone. Still cutting training budgets while approving transformation initiatives. Still blaming the people who saw it coming instead of the governance decisions that guaranteed failure.
A Challenge
If you’re a board member, a C-suite executive, stop abandoning your practitioners.
They’re the only ones who can tell you the truth about your organization’s readiness. They’re the only ones who will be there after the consultants leave. They’re the only ones with the institutional memory to prevent the next failure.
Invest in their development. Listen when they raise concerns. Build capability that outlasts any single engagement.
And if you’re a practitioner reading this — someone who’s been in Billy’s shoes or D’s shoes, someone who’s wondered if anyone was coming back:
You’re not alone.
The pattern is real. The abandonment is structural. And none of it is your fault.
But there are people out here who see you. Who remember what it’s like to be left holding the bag. Who will provide the support you need when you need it most – ideally before an initiative path is chosen.
Find them. Connect with them. And refuse to let the system break you.
Billy made it work. So can you.
Jon Hansen is the creator of the Hansen Method and Hansen Fit Score (HFS) framework for procurement transformation. He has been documenting practitioner abandonment patterns at Procurement Insights since 2007. In February 2026, he’s launching a subscription resource service designed for practitioners navigating transformation in organizations that aren’t ready to listen. Because someone should be there after the consultants leave.
Procurement Insights
Practitioner Abandonment: What Happens After Your ProcureTech Initiative Goes Up in Flames?
Posted on January 8, 2026
0
The consultants left. The vendor got blamed. And the practitioner who saw it coming? They’re still there — wondering if anyone’s coming back.
The Question No One Answers
What happens after the consultants leave?
Not during the engagement, when the conference rooms are full and the Gantt charts are color-coded and everyone’s aligned on the “transformation roadmap.” Not during go-live, when the champagne corks pop and the vendor takes a victory lap.
After.
When the consultants pack up their laptops and move to the next client. When the implementation partner’s contract expires. When the ERP goes live — or doesn’t — and suddenly the organization has to actually run the thing they just spent $10 million buying.
What happens to the practitioners left holding the bag?
I’ve been asking that question for 30 years. And I keep getting the same answer: abandonment.
September 2008: The Call from Georgia
My phone rang in September 2008. On the other end was a Category Manager at the State of Georgia named Billy Gilbert.
Billy had a problem. A major consulting engagement had just ended. The consultants had done their work — requirements gathered, recommendations delivered, contracts negotiated — and then they were gone. Moved on to the next client, the next engagement, the next billable project.
Billy and his team were left in a “what’s next” holding pattern.
“Now what?”
That was the question underneath the question. The consultants had come in, done their thing, and left. But no one had planned for what came next. No knowledge transfer. No capability building. No answer to the obvious follow-up: How do we actually sustain this?
So Billy reached out to me — a blogger in Canada he’d never met — because there was no one else.
Think about that. A state government employee, managing millions in public spend, had to seek mentorship from a stranger online because the consulting contract didn’t include the clause “make sure the client can survive without us.”
A few months later, Billy wrote me a LinkedIn recommendation. The words still hit:
The Abandonment Gap
Billy’s situation wasn’t unique. It was — and is — the norm.
Over the past three decades, a pattern has emerged that I call the Abandonment Gap:
The math doesn’t work. We’re spending more on consultants while getting worse results and leaving practitioners more stranded than ever.
Why? Because the consulting model is designed to end. Engagements have scopes, timelines, and off-ramps. But organizational capability doesn’t work that way. It requires sustained investment, continuous development, and institutional commitment.
None of which appear on a consulting contract.
The Data: 30 Years of Documented Abandonment
This isn’t anecdote. It’s pattern.
The Blame Inversion
A study by Mosaic Project Services found that 76% of project failure causes fall under executive and general management — not project management, not practitioners, not vendors. Only 7 of 29 commonly cited failure reasons fall exclusively in the practitioner’s realm.
Yet when projects fail, who gets blamed? The project manager. The implementation team. The vendor. The consultants. Anyone except the executives who approved an under-resourced initiative without a readiness assessment.
W. Edwards Deming said it decades ago: 95% of problems in business are caused by systems and processes. Only 5% are caused by people.
We’ve spent 30 years ignoring that ratio.
The Burnout Epidemic
The numbers are staggering:
And here’s the kicker: Only 10% of CPOs believe their teams have the skills to deliver their strategy (Deloitte, 2023).
Ten percent.
So 90% of CPOs know their teams aren’t equipped to succeed — and what do organizations do? Cut training budgets. Lean out departments. Ask one person to do the work of three.
Then blame them when it falls apart.
The Leaning Out
During the Great Recession, procurement departments became targets for “cost savings” — which meant headcount reduction. Teams of three to five were cut to one.
When healthier economic times returned, those resources were never restored. Departmental growth didn’t keep pace with company growth. The work expanded; the teams didn’t.
Today, the average procurement professional is doing the work of two to three people. They don’t have time to “stay on top of” their categories — they barely have time to get contracts out the door. The deep knowledge, the supplier relationships, the strategic thinking? Gone. There’s no bandwidth left.
And when a transformation initiative lands on their desk — an ERP implementation, an AI deployment, a “digital transformation” — they’re expected to absorb it on top of everything else.
The Pattern: Authority Down, Blame Up
Here’s why abandonment persists: the system is designed to protect decision-makers, not practitioners.
When the initiative fails:
Authority flows down. Blame flows up. And the practitioners — the ones who actually have to make things work — are abandoned at every stage.
January 2025: The Pattern Repeats
I’m working with a practitioner right now. Let’s call her “D.”
D is a Director of Purchasing at a mid-market company. Her organization just came off a recent failed initiative — no post-mortem, no lessons learned, no readiness assessment. Now they’re launching an ERP transformation.
D sees everything. She knows the organization isn’t ready. She’s raised concerns — diplomatically, professionally, with documentation. She’s pushed for a Phase 0 readiness assessment. She’s challenged the consulting firm’s “Change Management” survey as insufficient.
And she keeps getting “the look.”
About a month ago, D sent me an email. She’s still fighting. Still pushing. Still documenting. But buried in the update was this line:
She’s bracing for the moment when she has to decide: stay and accept the suboptimal status quo, or leave.
That’s the choice practitioners face when organizations abandon them. Brittany Thomas, a procurement strategist I respect, named it perfectly:
Both are damaging. And both happen quietly, invisibly, while the organization moves on to the next initiative.
The Hidden Cost
When practitioners leave — or stay and disengage — organizations lose something they can never recover: institutional memory.
The practitioner who knows where the bodies are buried. Who remembers why the last three initiatives failed. Who can tell you which suppliers actually deliver and which ones just talk a good game. Who understands the real processes, not the ones documented in the policy manual.
That knowledge walks out the door every time an organization abandons a practitioner. And no consulting engagement can replace it.
This is the hidden cost of the Abandonment Gap. Not just burnout. Not just turnover. The systematic erosion of the organizational capability required to succeed at transformation.
You can’t implement AI if you’ve driven out everyone who understands the business well enough to govern it.
Billy Made It. How Many Others Didn’t?
Here’s the thing about Billy Gilbert: he’s still there.
Twenty years later, he’s a Category Manager at the State of Georgia, managing $250 million in enterprise spend. He built national contracts for transit buses and school buses. He figured it out.
But Billy didn’t have to make it alone, nor do you.
Billy is the 20% who survive and thrive.
What about the 80% who don’t?
They’re not much different than Billy. They’re not less committed. They just had less luck — fewer external resources, fewer mentors willing to give them the time they needed, and therefore fewer options when the consultancies left them stranded.
They burned out. They left. They disengaged. They became the turnover statistics we cite without ever connecting to the governance decisions that caused them.
The Question I Keep Asking
What happens after the consultants leave?
In 2008, Billy Gilbert called me because no one else was there.
In 2025, D is pushing for Phase 0 because she knows the organization isn’t ready — and wondering if anyone will listen before it’s too late.
The technology changed. The ERP vendors changed. The buzzwords changed — from “digital transformation” to “AI-powered automation” to “agentic systems.”
The abandonment didn’t change.
We’re still leaving practitioners to figure it out alone. Still cutting training budgets while approving transformation initiatives. Still blaming the people who saw it coming instead of the governance decisions that guaranteed failure.
A Challenge
If you’re a board member, a C-suite executive, stop abandoning your practitioners.
They’re the only ones who can tell you the truth about your organization’s readiness. They’re the only ones who will be there after the consultants leave. They’re the only ones with the institutional memory to prevent the next failure.
Invest in their development. Listen when they raise concerns. Build capability that outlasts any single engagement.
And if you’re a practitioner reading this — someone who’s been in Billy’s shoes or D’s shoes, someone who’s wondered if anyone was coming back:
You’re not alone.
The pattern is real. The abandonment is structural. And none of it is your fault.
But there are people out here who see you. Who remember what it’s like to be left holding the bag. Who will provide the support you need when you need it most – ideally before an initiative path is chosen.
Find them. Connect with them. And refuse to let the system break you.
Billy made it work. So can you.
Jon Hansen is the creator of the Hansen Method and Hansen Fit Score (HFS) framework for procurement transformation. He has been documenting practitioner abandonment patterns at Procurement Insights since 2007. In February 2026, he’s launching a subscription resource service designed for practitioners navigating transformation in organizations that aren’t ready to listen. Because someone should be there after the consultants leave.
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