Field Notes · Public sector · 2026-05-15 · Seven minutes read · By Aria Patel

What procurement teams should ask before hiring a software partner

Procurement officers ask the wrong twelve questions because the templates have not changed since 2015. Here are the twelve we wish we got asked instead, with the answers a serious firm should give to each one.

The problem with the standard questionnaire

Most procurement questionnaires in 2026 still ask vendors to describe their methodology, list their certifications, and provide three reference clients. Every responsible firm answers identically. The questionnaire does not tell you who can deliver and who cannot.

Below are twelve questions we have seen separate the real firms from the staffing firms in regulated procurements. We have answered each one the way we want to be answered when we are the buyer.

1. Who, by name, will be in the daily standup?

Not the org chart. Not the firm's "delivery model." The names. If the firm cannot tell you who shows up on day two, the firm does not know yet, which means they are going to staff your project out of whoever is on the bench in three months.

Answer to expect: A first name, a last name, a LinkedIn URL, and a phone number. If the answer is a process noun, walk.

2. What does this firm say no to, and when did they last say it?

Every consulting firm claims they have principles. The interesting question is when those principles cost them money. A firm that cannot name a recent mandate they refused is either lying or has no principles to refuse for.

Answer to expect: A specific story. "We declined a six-month build with [type of buyer] because they wanted us to hide the training data of a fine-tuned model from their auditor." If the story is generic, the principle is too.

3. Where does customer data live during inference?

For AI projects: this is the question that decides whether the firm has actually shipped sovereign systems or just talked about them. The answer should reference your VPC, your on-prem cluster, your cloud account, not the firm's.

Answer to expect: "By default, your VPC. We support on-prem deployments for Protected B and equivalent. We can deploy in your AWS / Azure / GCP account, or self-hosted Kubernetes inside your perimeter. We never require data to leave your sovereignty boundary."

4. Can I see a decision log from a system you shipped two years ago?

Replayability is fashionable to claim. The proof is whether the firm can show you a real one. Audit-grade decision logs from two years ago, in a working system, are rare. Most "replayable decisions" claims are aspirational.

Answer to expect: A sanitized screenshot or video walkthrough of a real system the firm shipped, where you can pick any decision in the last 24 months and see the full context. If the firm cannot show you one, they have not built one.

5. What is the firm's process when an AI model gets a decision wrong?

This question separates firms that have shipped AI in production from firms that have shipped AI in demos. Production AI gets things wrong on day two. The firm needs a documented process for it.

Answer to expect: A four-step incident playbook with named owners, a refusal-tuned fallback behavior, and a documented mechanism for human review of any high-stakes decision.

6. How does the firm handle bilingual delivery?

If you are a Canadian buyer, this is not optional. The honest answer is rare: most firms add French as a translation pass at the end. A serious firm architects in French from day one, in the same repo, in the same review, by the same team.

Answer to expect: "EN+FR parity at the asset level. The same engineer reviews both. French is in the build pipeline, not the localization vendor's queue."

7. What is the firm's accessibility posture by default?

WCAG 2.2 AA is the floor, not the achievement. If the firm needs to be asked, the answer is no.

Answer to expect: "AA by default. The CI pipeline blocks merges that fail axe-core. We can provide a fresh accessibility report for any page you point to within 48 hours."

8. What happens at the end of the contract?

The most-skipped question in procurement. Many firms are economically incentivized to make the handover incomplete. Ask what the hand-back package looks like.

Answer to expect: A specific deliverable: architecture, runbooks, decision logs, threat model, the security questionnaire ready to forward, a recorded handover session, and access transfer documented. The firm should design for your independence from them.

9. What is the smallest possible engagement you would take?

Firms that only want six-figure deals will tell you so. A firm that says "a 5-day discovery, fixed price" is a firm that is willing to be useful at scale you can verify before you commit.

Answer to expect: A small, fixed-price discovery offer with a written deliverable. Wouessi runs these for $15k and ships a one-page recommendation in 48 hours.

10. How does the firm handle disagreement with the buyer?

If the firm agrees with everything you say, you are paying them to nod. The firm should be willing to push back, in writing, when they think you are about to make a mistake. If they cannot tell you about a recent time they did this, they will not do it for you.

Answer to expect: A specific story where the firm wrote a memo saying "this is the wrong direction", and either won the argument or accepted the no.

11. What is the firm's posture on subcontracting?

Boutique firms ship boutique work. If the firm subcontracts 60% of delivery, the firm is a staffing layer. That can be the right answer for some buyers, just know it before signing.

Answer to expect: A clear statement of what is done in-house vs. with subcontractors, plus the names of the subcontracting firms.

12. What is the firm's diversity-supplier status, and how does it map to your supplier-diversity programs?

For Canadian buyers: CAMSC. For US federal: SBA 8(a) or NMSDC. For provincial: check your jurisdiction. This question is procurement-relevant, not optics-relevant.

Answer to expect: The specific certification number and the programs the certification supports. Wouessi is CAMSC A-11298 in Canada and SAM.gov ACTIVE for US federal procurement, CAGE 1Z1Z9, UEI RMU6LK3W6NZ5.

The meta-question

If you are reading this and your procurement team does not ask any of the twelve, the procurement is going to surface the wrong firm. The good news: you can ask all twelve in a 30-minute call before sending the formal RFP.

If you want a template that adapts the twelve to your specific procurement, the next useful conversation is twenty minutes. We will share the template even if you decide not to work with us.

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About the author. Aria leads accessibility and procurement-readiness work at Wouessi. She has read more than forty MERX, CanadaBuys, and SAM.gov bids in the last three years, and written the responses to most of them.