What happens after signature
Procurement evaluates once. The system you signed for keeps running, and keeps changing, long after that evaluation ends. Everything below happens quietly, on a clock nobody put in the contract.
An internal build has no signature, and so no date that forces the first check. Read “signature” as “go-live”, and put the dates below in the calendar before the build starts.
Month one.
The metric is defined, the baseline is set, everyone signs. This is the one moment procurement checks, and it is the moment least likely to reveal a problem, because nothing has run yet.
Month six.
Ask, now, who checks that the metric still holds — not at signing, but this month, and every month after. A frozen definition, an unaudited number, and a vendor who both does the work and reports the result are three separate ways the answer quietly becomes “no one, except them.”
Month twelve.
Check the baseline against the one you actually agreed to. A baseline set during your worst quarter, never revisited, means the vendor keeps getting paid on improvements your own team already made — and check whether the metric could be improving while the real outcome gets worse: cost-per-ticket falls if quality falls, cycle time drops if steps get skipped. Ask which guardrail metric is contractually paired with the one you’re paying against.
Then ask who is doing the checking, and whether they were in the room at month one. By now the sponsor who championed the deployment has more to lose from an honest finding than on the day it was approved, and the vendor running the system has a renewal riding on the check passing. Neither has to act in bad faith for the check to lean. It is held by whoever is closest, and the closest party is the one with something to protect. A check worth relying on is run by someone who was not party to the original decision.
Month eighteen.
Not month one — this is when the exit terms actually matter. If you leave, who owns the rebuilt process, the prompts, the fine-tuned models, the data? A contract where leaving means losing the process isn’t a service. It’s a dependency with a subscription attached.
If the vendor proves the savings, the vendor owns the deal. Verification belongs to the buyer, or it isn’t verification.
Bring a real proposal to The Attempt and we’ll run it against the full ten-question Measurement Clause Checklist, live.
“Because the check that matters happens after signature, and by then everyone close enough to run it has a decision to protect.”