The Consulting Procurement Chronicle – May 2026 opens with two insights for procurement, finance, and strategy leaders who have responsibility for consulting decisions and have started asking whether the process they use to make those decisions is actually producing the outcomes they intend. This edition addresses two problems that exist on either side of that question: the discipline required to choose the right proposal, and the structural exposure hiding in the spend that never quite made it through a formal process.
Here are the insights you won’t want to miss.
INSIGHTS
Our Consulting Procurement Chronicle – May 2026 begins with the following insights.
Most organisations underinvest in proposal evaluation. The scoring happens quickly, the same people are always in the room, and the outcome reflects internal dynamics as much as the merits of what was submitted.
This insight examines what it takes to make that process genuinely objective — how to structure the evaluator group, manage personal agendas, and reach a consensus that holds after the decision is made. The procurement process is too critical to be left to a flat averaging of reviewers’ scores.
Click the tile to read how to bring more rigour to the part of consulting procurement that most teams treat as administrative.
The 6 little secrets of objective proposal evaluation to help you select a winner
Stop guessing which consulting proposal wins. ConsultingQuest’s 6-step framework helps procurement teams evaluate objectively and build consensus. Apply it now.
CONSOURCE INSIGHTS
As part of our Consulting Procurement Chronicle – May 2026, we also published an insight on Consource.io. Let’s take a look.
A meaningful share of what organisations classify as tail spend is not genuinely tail spend. Projects that recur annually under different names, mandates structured in phases to stay beneath the threshold that would trigger scrutiny, and spend reclassified through chains no one has revisited — these are significant commitments governed as if they were small ones. The insight identifies four practices to start tackling this: cleaning the data, examining what your thresholds are actually producing, designing for the self-sourcing that will always exist, and building visibility without removing the flexibility business units legitimately need.
Click the tile to read how organisations can close the gap between what they believe their consulting tail contains and what it actually does.
How big is your consulting tail? Four practices to start tackling it
Learn how to manage consulting tail spend with 4 practical strategies. Improve tail spend management, increase visibility, and optimize consulting spend. Read More
Final Thoughts
This edition of the Consulting Procurement Chronicle – May 2026 follows a single thread from two directions. Selecting the right proposal and governing the spend that bypasses the selection process entirely are not separate problems. A rigorous evaluation process only applies to the consulting spend that reaches it — and for most organisations, the tail is both larger and less understood than the headline figure suggests. Getting both right is the baseline for managing consulting as a category.
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