Before you commission a technical assessment, find out what decision it is going to be used in.
Companies commission them for three reasons and only one is the reason people give. To learn something nobody knows. To create a record, usually because a decision has already been made and needs support. Or to win an argument with a counterparty who disagrees about money.
All three produce real work. Only the first one is a question.
Water goes down
On the night of October 15, 1984, a four-alarm fire broke out at 475 L’Enfant Plaza in Washington DC, the building housing both the US Postal Service headquarters and PBS. It started on the ninth floor shortly after eleven and burned through the upper floors. Around 190 firefighters brought it under control in about an hour.
The water went through the building and into the computer room in the basement.
PBS put preliminary damage to its property above twelve million dollars, and a spokeswoman listed broadcasting equipment, tape and editing machines, and computers. Insurance investigators toured the building the next day.
An insurance company hired one of the Big Five, and that firm hired us. The question was whether the computers still worked and, more to the point, whether they were still accurate.
Working and correct are different questions
Nobody had done this before as far as anyone knew. We designed programs from scratch that ran the equipment and compared output against known good results. Most in the general-purpose language of the era, my portion in assembler because I was fast in it and it needed to be quick.
The hard part is the reference. Something has to establish what the right answer looks like, and the machines that would normally tell you are the ones in question.
The deeper problem is that damaged equipment does not fail cleanly. A machine that will not turn on is easy. A machine that turns on, runs, produces output, and is wrong once every few thousand operations is what ruins a company.
Every restore from backup after a ransomware incident faces the same question and almost nobody asks it. The system came back. Nobody checked whether the data came back correct.
Twenty percent, and months of assessment
The insurance company wanted to pay a certain amount. PBS wanted new computers. Our project existed to establish whether refurbishing cost more than replacing, and to establish it straight.
The difference between the two positions was around twenty percent.
Nobody was deceived. The client told us plainly what the project was for. We knew from the beginning and we did honest work anyway. The engineering was real, the findings were real, and the project was still an instrument in a negotiation between two parties who each wanted a particular answer.
Neither side wanted it to end
When two sides are using an assessment to argue, neither is in a hurry for it to finish. The work continued for a long time. We never really finished it, and I left without learning the verdict.
From my seat it was a good assignment. Real money to spend, the best hotels in Washington, and a visit to the Smithsonian. It remains the only time I have been to DC.
Meanwhile the flooded computers sat there and the argument kept running.
The insurance company eventually said buy the new computers. They paid considerably more than the original settlement would have cost, after months of assessment work on top.
Both sides behaved rationally the entire time and the combined outcome was worse for everyone than an early agreement.
Four questions before you commission one
What decision does this report feed into. Who else will read it, and do they have a position already. What happens if the finding goes the other way. And what is the difference between the two positions, in money.
The last one gets skipped. If an assessment costs a meaningful fraction of the amount being argued over, it is not a way to save money.
The full article is on my site: https://thewritingking.com/assessment-as-a-negotiating-instrument/. It runs longer, carries the diagrams, and answers the questions readers ask most.
These are AI-made summaries of longer articles on my site, written with AI assistance from my own interviews and my own career. Nothing goes out that I have not read and approved.