By Jon Hansen | Procurement Insights | March 2026
A practitioner I respect said something recently that I could not ignore:
“Jon is really good — but he’s almost on the science level. Practitioners want results today.”
He was right.
And more importantly — he exposed a gap that should not exist.
For eighteen years (and counting), the Procurement Insights archive has been building a longitudinal record of why enterprise technology initiatives fail. The evidence base is now 3,300+ documents deep. The Hansen Fit Score™, Phase 0™, and RAM 2025™ represent a methodology refined across forty years of high-technology experience, SR&ED-funded government research, and seven distinct technology eras.
The science is sound. The question he was raising was whether the science was deployable — not whether it was true, but whether it was usable at 7am on a Monday before a vendor briefing.
That is a fair challenge. The right response to a fair challenge is to address it directly.
The Gap He Identified
There is a difference between understanding why something fails and knowing what to do about it before your next meeting.
If insight cannot be applied before your next meeting, it is not yet useful.
The Procurement Insights archive has always been oriented toward the first — building the evidentiary case, documenting the patterns, naming the structural causes that more prominent voices have measured without explaining. That work is not stopping. The archive is the moat. The longitudinal evidence is the differentiator.
But Canda Rozier — Hansen Models™ Senior Advisory Board — identified the same gap from a different angle. When asked what a LinkedIn follower would say Hansen Models™ offers, her honest answer was: “Subscriptions, reports, research articles.” Not assessment services. Not organizational readiness diagnostics. Not Phase 0™.
Two practitioners. Two different vantage points. The same observation.
The archive produces insight. What has been missing is the bridge from insight to immediate, provable action.
Introducing Your Readiness Check
Starting this week, every Procurement Insights post — new and existing — will close with Your Readiness Check.
The purpose is straightforward: here is how you use today’s insights to assess and apply this post’s core theme. It is an important starting point that is useful right now.
This is the step every framework assumes — and almost none provide.
The format is simple and will never change:
Identify one specific thing in your organization that the post’s core argument makes visible. Check it against a single comparison or question. Decide with a binary outcome — aligned or misaligned, proceed or stop. Act with one immediate next move completable before your next meeting.
Four steps. No consulting engagement required to access the value.
Your Readiness Check is not a simplification of the methodology. It is a translation of it — the same way a diagnostic instrument translates clinical science into a reading a practitioner can act on immediately. The science behind Phase 0™ is not less rigorous because it produces a clear output. It is more useful.
Why This Matters Commercially
The practitioner who said I was operating at the science level was not rejecting the work. He was telling me he needed a handle.
Handles convert authority into demand.
The clearest illustration of this arrived unsolicited, from a senior procurement practitioner currently mid-implementation at a mid-market organization. Shared with permission. Identity and organization withheld.
He had been pressing his consulting team on the readiness question for weeks — explaining, as he put it, “the readiness factor of our project with high-level evidence-based examples and why I keep asking certain questions.” When the team’s change management survey finally surfaced results, his read was immediate:
“I can identify the misalignment based on the sequence of timeline events. After demos and during implementation workshops is when they would have ‘readiness’ — or in their words, ‘implementation readiness.’ Totally different topics. Without a Phase 0 internal readiness assessment to understand our gaps first, we are not ready to host implementation workshops. We are working backwards now and on the clock.
It takes clear, serious, dedicated time to implement — not start from scratch, implement, and start governance all at the same time.”
He did not wait for the consulting team to catch up. He structured three decision options for his leadership — each one leading to the same destination: a readiness engagement. Then, in a message that stopped me:
“The survey revealed similar readiness gaps. Now it’s time to put readiness mitigation in play.”
And then:
“I have been trying to think — what is our 4pm question?”
That question — the one that cuts through the day’s noise and names the single thing that actually determines the outcome — is the question Phase 0™ is designed to answer. This practitioner arrived at it independently, mid-deployment, under pressure, before a formal engagement was in place.
He was not consuming the methodology. He was operating inside it.
That is what happens when the science becomes deployable. A practitioner under live deployment pressure, without a formal engagement, structured the readiness problem himself, surfaced the gaps through a change management instrument, presented decision options to leadership, and asked the question that Phase 0™ exists to answer — all before picking up the phone.
Right now, the Procurement Insights archive is respected. The Hansen Fit Score™ is credible. Phase 0™ is intellectually sound. What Your Readiness Check does is give every reader — regardless of their familiarity with the methodology — a way to prove the framework’s relevance inside their own organization before their next meeting.
When a CPO completes the Authority Gap self-diagnostic and finds that their last four major technology decisions were made by a different function than the one that owns implementation authority, they have not just read a blog post. They have found a problem. And they now know who to call.
That is the bridge from thought leadership to market pull.
What Changes — and What Does Not
The archive continues. The longitudinal documentation continues. The HFS™ assessments continue. The RAM 2025™ validation framework continues. The independence policy — no vendor sponsorships, no referral arrangements, assessment published whether or not the vendor engages — continues.
What changes is the closing section of every post.
Where a reader previously finished an article with a clear understanding of a structural problem, they will now finish it with a clear understanding of a structural problem and a specific action they can take immediately to find out whether that problem exists in their own organization.
The science does not become less rigorous by being deployable. It becomes more valuable.
The Weekly Format
Every week on LinkedIn, the post-of-the-week will include that week’s Your Readiness Check as a standalone checklist — formatted for immediate use, without requiring the reader to visit the full post first.
The goal is straightforward: every week, give one procurement leader one actionable diagnostic they can run before their next meeting, that produces a finding they could not have named before, that connects to a deeper engagement if they want to close the gap properly.
Insight without action is overhead.
Insight that produces a result in five minutes becomes a decision tool.
Your Readiness Check is the bridge between the two.
Jon Hansen is the Founder of Hansen Models™ and the author of the Procurement Insights research archive, spanning 18 years (and counting) and 3,300+ published documents. He has 42 years of experience in high-tech and procurement. The Hansen Fit Score™ (HFS™), Phase 0™ Organizational Readiness Diagnostic, and RAM 2025™ Multimodel Validation Framework are proprietary methodologies of Hansen Models™. Assessment services and organizational readiness diagnostics: procureinsights.com
Hansen Fit Score™ Vendor Assessment Series | Hansen Models™ (1001279896 Ontario Inc.) | © 2026
-30-
Procurement Insights
Introducing Your Readiness Check: Because Insight Without Action Is Just Overhead
Posted on March 18, 2026
0
By Jon Hansen | Procurement Insights | March 2026
A practitioner I respect said something recently that I could not ignore:
“Jon is really good — but he’s almost on the science level. Practitioners want results today.”
He was right.
And more importantly — he exposed a gap that should not exist.
For eighteen years (and counting), the Procurement Insights archive has been building a longitudinal record of why enterprise technology initiatives fail. The evidence base is now 3,300+ documents deep. The Hansen Fit Score™, Phase 0™, and RAM 2025™ represent a methodology refined across forty years of high-technology experience, SR&ED-funded government research, and seven distinct technology eras.
The science is sound. The question he was raising was whether the science was deployable — not whether it was true, but whether it was usable at 7am on a Monday before a vendor briefing.
That is a fair challenge. The right response to a fair challenge is to address it directly.
The Gap He Identified
There is a difference between understanding why something fails and knowing what to do about it before your next meeting.
If insight cannot be applied before your next meeting, it is not yet useful.
The Procurement Insights archive has always been oriented toward the first — building the evidentiary case, documenting the patterns, naming the structural causes that more prominent voices have measured without explaining. That work is not stopping. The archive is the moat. The longitudinal evidence is the differentiator.
But Canda Rozier — Hansen Models™ Senior Advisory Board — identified the same gap from a different angle. When asked what a LinkedIn follower would say Hansen Models™ offers, her honest answer was: “Subscriptions, reports, research articles.” Not assessment services. Not organizational readiness diagnostics. Not Phase 0™.
Two practitioners. Two different vantage points. The same observation.
The archive produces insight. What has been missing is the bridge from insight to immediate, provable action.
Introducing Your Readiness Check
Starting this week, every Procurement Insights post — new and existing — will close with Your Readiness Check.
The purpose is straightforward: here is how you use today’s insights to assess and apply this post’s core theme. It is an important starting point that is useful right now.
This is the step every framework assumes — and almost none provide.
The format is simple and will never change:
Identify one specific thing in your organization that the post’s core argument makes visible. Check it against a single comparison or question. Decide with a binary outcome — aligned or misaligned, proceed or stop. Act with one immediate next move completable before your next meeting.
Four steps. No consulting engagement required to access the value.
Your Readiness Check is not a simplification of the methodology. It is a translation of it — the same way a diagnostic instrument translates clinical science into a reading a practitioner can act on immediately. The science behind Phase 0™ is not less rigorous because it produces a clear output. It is more useful.
Why This Matters Commercially
The practitioner who said I was operating at the science level was not rejecting the work. He was telling me he needed a handle.
Handles convert authority into demand.
The clearest illustration of this arrived unsolicited, from a senior procurement practitioner currently mid-implementation at a mid-market organization. Shared with permission. Identity and organization withheld.
He had been pressing his consulting team on the readiness question for weeks — explaining, as he put it, “the readiness factor of our project with high-level evidence-based examples and why I keep asking certain questions.” When the team’s change management survey finally surfaced results, his read was immediate:
He did not wait for the consulting team to catch up. He structured three decision options for his leadership — each one leading to the same destination: a readiness engagement. Then, in a message that stopped me:
And then:
That question — the one that cuts through the day’s noise and names the single thing that actually determines the outcome — is the question Phase 0™ is designed to answer. This practitioner arrived at it independently, mid-deployment, under pressure, before a formal engagement was in place.
He was not consuming the methodology. He was operating inside it.
That is what happens when the science becomes deployable. A practitioner under live deployment pressure, without a formal engagement, structured the readiness problem himself, surfaced the gaps through a change management instrument, presented decision options to leadership, and asked the question that Phase 0™ exists to answer — all before picking up the phone.
Right now, the Procurement Insights archive is respected. The Hansen Fit Score™ is credible. Phase 0™ is intellectually sound. What Your Readiness Check does is give every reader — regardless of their familiarity with the methodology — a way to prove the framework’s relevance inside their own organization before their next meeting.
When a CPO completes the Authority Gap self-diagnostic and finds that their last four major technology decisions were made by a different function than the one that owns implementation authority, they have not just read a blog post. They have found a problem. And they now know who to call.
That is the bridge from thought leadership to market pull.
What Changes — and What Does Not
The archive continues. The longitudinal documentation continues. The HFS™ assessments continue. The RAM 2025™ validation framework continues. The independence policy — no vendor sponsorships, no referral arrangements, assessment published whether or not the vendor engages — continues.
What changes is the closing section of every post.
Where a reader previously finished an article with a clear understanding of a structural problem, they will now finish it with a clear understanding of a structural problem and a specific action they can take immediately to find out whether that problem exists in their own organization.
The science does not become less rigorous by being deployable. It becomes more valuable.
The Weekly Format
Every week on LinkedIn, the post-of-the-week will include that week’s Your Readiness Check as a standalone checklist — formatted for immediate use, without requiring the reader to visit the full post first.
The goal is straightforward: every week, give one procurement leader one actionable diagnostic they can run before their next meeting, that produces a finding they could not have named before, that connects to a deeper engagement if they want to close the gap properly.
Insight without action is overhead.
Insight that produces a result in five minutes becomes a decision tool.
Your Readiness Check is the bridge between the two.
Jon Hansen is the Founder of Hansen Models™ and the author of the Procurement Insights research archive, spanning 18 years (and counting) and 3,300+ published documents. He has 42 years of experience in high-tech and procurement. The Hansen Fit Score™ (HFS™), Phase 0™ Organizational Readiness Diagnostic, and RAM 2025™ Multimodel Validation Framework are proprietary methodologies of Hansen Models™. Assessment services and organizational readiness diagnostics: procureinsights.com
Hansen Fit Score™ Vendor Assessment Series | Hansen Models™ (1001279896 Ontario Inc.) | © 2026
-30-
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