_004 You *should get what you pay for
Why software buyers accept planning standards no other industry would tolerate.
I received a cold outreach email recently that triggered this piece.
The email was friendly enough — at least as friendly as an automated outreach campaign can be — but one sentence really wound me up:
“I can see Red Shift is striving to be the fastest and lowest-cost consultancy in London.”
No. No, we are not.
We sell predictability in software development. We are not in the business of racing to the bottom.
If you want exactly what you asked for, delivered when you asked for it, for the price we agreed — that’s us.
If you want cheap, there are endless consultancies willing to promise you the world at a fraction of the cost in half the time… all conveniently wrapped in an open-ended contract.
So it got my noggin’ jogging:
Why does a significant portion of the market still believe speed and cost should be the primary drivers when building the foundation of their business?
Your core business logic is encoded in your software.
If the software is wrong, your business is wrong.
If the software breaks, your business breaks.
Speed and low cost should not be the priority here — yet the industry has conditioned buyers to believe otherwise.
To illustrate the absurdity, let’s compare this to a mature, predictable industry with real planning standards: residential construction.
What a single-plot house build requires
Below is a typical documentation set for a single residential planning application in the UK — roughly 16 separate documents before a single brick is laid.
Mandatory Administrative Docs
Application Form
Ownership Certificate
Agricultural Land Declaration
Planning Application Fee
Mandatory Drawings
Location Plan
Site/Block Plan
Existing & Proposed Floor Plans
Existing & Proposed Elevations
Design & Levels
Design & Access Statement
Sections / Site Levels Plans
Environmental & Regulatory
Flood Risk Assessment
Tree Survey / Arboricultural Impact Assessment
Ecology Appraisal / Bat Survey
Heritage Statement
Infrastructure
Transport / Visibility Statement
Drainage / Foul Water Strategy
……and here is how long that takes
A realistic planning timeline for a single-plot residential build:
Phase 1 — Briefing & Surveying
Client briefing: ~1 week
Site survey: 2–3 weeks
Concept sketches: 2–4 weeks
Phase 2 — Refinement & Specialist Reports
Design refinements: 2–4 weeks
Specialist reports (ecology, trees, flooding, etc.): 3–8 weeks
Phase 3 — Final Documentation & Submission
Final drawings & DAS: 2–4 weeks
LPA validation: 1–2 weeks
Total: 6 months of pre-construction planning. 6 months of Discovery.
Now compare this level of upfront thinking to enterprise software planning:
For a typical enterprise software build in the UK:
“Discovery” lasts ~3 weeks
A quote is produced immediately afterward
Build costs are often comparable to a house build
The domain complexity is exponentially higher
The system is far less predictable than a physical building
Yet buyers accept the premise that comprehensive discovery can be done by a third party in under a month.
This, frankly, is delusional.
The environment for a house build is predictable:
The laws of physics don’t change
Gravity remains constant
Requirements don’t mutate halfway through
Walls don’t suddenly need to “integrate with Salesforce”
Software is the opposite: entirely dynamic, highly uncertain, and deeply entangled with evolving business logic.
Yet somehow the industry convinces people that three weeks is enough time to understand:
the business as it currently operates
its implicit and explicit processes
its desired future state
its regulatory constraints
its leadership intent
its system architecture
its integration landscape
its delivery governance
and then produce a fixed price
In three weeks…..
One of two things must be true:
1. The consultancy has genuinely understood your entire business at a deep technical and organisational level in under a month and produced a fully costed, risk-balanced programme plan.
OR….
2. They are incentivised to get you to sign an open-ended Time and Materials contract first, and figure everything else out later. “Agile” indeed….
Which seems more likely?
If you’ve ever worked under a time-and-materials contract, you already know the answer.
The Paradox of Incentives
The client wants a proposal ASAP.
The consultancy wants to secure the contract ASAP.
Both incentives make meaningful discovery impossible.
If you don’t understand your system architecture, your business logic, and your own leadership intent at a deep level…
…how on earth do you expect a third party to grasp it in only weeks?
If you’re a consultancy, your responsibility is not simply to “win the business”, but to help the client understand what you are actually offering — and what it takes to deliver predictably.
Real discovery is not a sales tactic.
It is a technical investigation.
Rushing to a proposal is not a service - it is an abdication.
Why does software consultancy have a bad reputation?
Because of this exact incentive structure.
Clients think they want fast and cheap.
Would want these qualities in your dentist?
Consultancies try to meet these expectations in a hyper-competitive market.
The result?
Nonsense proposals
Impossible delivery timelines
Wildly inaccurate estimates
Massive overruns
Broken trust
And a quote that may as well have been generated by a dice roll
Details matter
A proposal without detail is not a proposal.
It is a false promise.