What's inside the guide?
‘Ensuring value for money from your professional services SoW spend’, is the second in a series on services procurement management.
Authored by Jon Milton, Growth Director for Services Procurement, it draws on experience supporting over 100 organisations across the public and private sectors and conducting more than 2,000 procurements since 2015.
The guide focuses on three areas where organisations consistently lose value, and what to do about each one.
Supply costs
Understand the four main pricing formats used for professional services: time and materials, fixed fee, retainer, and outcome-based pricing. Learn how supplier pricing behaviour works, when each model is appropriate, and how to use market testing, competitive bidding, and structured scoping to achieve significantly better prices.
Demand costs
Discover how decentralised buying, without structured analysis of needs or supplier comparison, leads to overbuying, scope creep, variation orders, and inflated costs. The guide includes practical steps to reduce demand costs through better scoping, competitive quoting, and active SoW governance.
Internal costs
Explore how fragmented, business-unit-level purchasing creates duplicated effort, repeated legal and commercial cycles, rising management overheads, and increased IR35 and compliance exposure. The guide outlines how to reduce these costs through centralised intake, standardised contracts, and better SoW capture.
Each section includes a set of recommended actions you can act on immediately.
Why this guide matters
Professional services spend is often the least visible and least controlled category in an organisation's external workforce budget. Research consistently shows that, without an effective services procurement management process in place, most unpredictable professional services engagements are made directly between the end user and a single supplier.
The consequences are significant:
Demand costs driven by poor scoping, unchecked variation orders, and time and management extensions
Supply costs inflated by missed opportunities for competitive bidding and bid-level discounts
Internal costs compounded by duplicated effort, inconsistent contracts, and compliance risk
PMI's 2025 report, ‘Step Up: Redefining the path to project success with M.O.R.E’, found that just 50% of projects today meet a modern definition of success, with 35% of executives citing a disconnect between planning and execution as a key barrier.
The right approach to managing professional services spend addresses these failures at the root.
Get your free copy of the guide
Download our free guide ‘Ensuring value for money from your professional services SoW spend’, to gain practical, actionable insights you can apply straight away to take control of your professional services spend.
