I spent an afternoon this week on a call with a supplier’s head of technology, discussing their MHHS readiness. They had a detailed plan, a confident tone and a clear roadmap. They also had a legacy billing system that will not be ready in time, a fact they acknowledged in the final ten minutes, when we had run out of other things to discuss. I found this oddly reassuring. At least someone is being honest.
The reassuring part was specifically the order in which the admission came. Two years ago, the same supplier would have either denied the constraint outright or attempted to fold it into a vendor-blaming aside. This time, the admission was delivered flatly, with no excuses and no plan B. The plan B did not exist because the supplier had already accepted that there would be a six-month period after MHHS go-live in which their billing system would be a meaningful commercial liability. They had decided, deliberately, to absorb the cost rather than to ship a worse fix.
That is a reasonable decision. It is also, more interestingly, evidence of a particular kind of organisational maturity that is in shorter supply than you might think. The decision to ship a competent partial response, while accepting a quantified penalty for the missing component, is not the decision most large organisations are structured to make. The default move is to declare full readiness, paper over the gap with a workaround, and discover the workaround’s limits later, in production, under pressure.
The suppliers who chose the workaround path are starting to feel the shape of their decision. Several have quietly extended their go-live windows. Two have brought back consultants who left the programme in 2024.
The MHHS programme is now far enough along that the suppliers who chose the workaround path are starting to feel the shape of their decision. Several have quietly extended their go-live windows. Two have brought back consultants who left the programme in 2024. One, whose readiness statement I read with admiration last summer, has just signed a contract with a managed services provider for an emergency intervention. None of this is in the public domain. All of it is in the procurement pipelines.
The supplier I spent the afternoon with will be fine. Six months of degraded billing is recoverable. The suppliers who deferred the harder conversation, who told themselves the existing systems would stretch, are going to find themselves in a different category. They will discover, in the eighteen months after go-live, that the systems they kept did not just fail to evolve. They actively held back the parts of the business that did.
There is a particular kind of leadership that knows when to take the loss. It is uncomfortable. It involves a conversation with a board, or an investor, or a parent company that nobody wants to have. It produces a quarter, or two, or three of underperformance against a plan that was always optimistic. It is the difference between a company that survives a market restructuring and a company that does not. We will see who has it. The market is about to find out.