ROI as a Service: what it means, and how to hold any partner to it

Three things are agreed before any work starts: the scope, the fee, and the one number the work will be measured on. Then the partner stays through build, implementation and operation, measuring that number every week, until the return that was promised is the return the business gets. Only then does the business's own team take it over.

The number is specific to one process. Days from dispatch to invoice. Tax credit lost because a supplier never filed. Orders a field team took but nobody billed. A number like that can be read from the business's own records, so nobody has to take the partner's word for it.

Most projects fail after go-live, not before it. The software works and people keep using the spreadsheet, the register and the phone call. A partner paid on delivery has finished its job at that point. The business is left with a licence, a system and the old way of working.

So the stage that decides the return is implementation: every person who touches the process gets a job on the new system that is easier than the old one, the old and new run side by side until the new one wins on the floor, and the old one is switched off on a date everyone knows.

It comes out of a short, fixed-fee study of one process with the people who run it. The study looks for three kinds of leak: a fact typed twice, a number that waits on a person, and a register that disagrees with the ledger. Each leak is priced in money. The one worth fixing first becomes the number.

The business keeps the written map from that study whether or not it goes further.

From the first week of implementation, the number goes in front of the sponsor every week. Not a status slide, the number itself, read from the system.

The AI agents in the system are held to the same rule. Each one's flags, drafts and savings are reported monthly, and an agent that is not paying for itself is switched off rather than defended.

On a date agreed at the start, the business's team takes the system over, trained by running it with the partner watching before they run it alone. The business owns the code and the data. Nothing is built to be hard to leave, and the partner can keep operating it only if that is the better deal with the numbers in hand.

1. Which number, exactly, and where in our records will we read it?
2. Who measures it, how often, and who sees it?
3. What do you do in the months after go-live, when people drift back to the old way?
4. What do we own at the end: the code, the data, or a login?
5. On what date do you leave, and what does our team need to know by then?

A partner selling a return should answer all five before the contract. Our first stage, Advise, answers them in writing.