About Commissioning Desk

Most organisations will commission at least one significant digital project — a new website, a platform migration, an ecommerce build, a bespoke internal tool. It will cost tens of thousands of pounds/dollars, take months, and when it goes wrong the consequences land on the person who signed it off.

Despite the stakes, there is remarkably little honest, independent guidance available to the people making these decisions. What exists tends to fall into two camps: vendor content dressed up as advice, or technical commentary written for other technologists. Neither serves the marketing manager trying to evaluate three agency proposals, or the operations lead wondering whether their current platform is costing more than it should.

Commissioning Desk was created to fill that gap.

What we cover

This is a publication for people who buy, manage, and evaluate digital work — not people who build it. We write about the decisions that sit between the business case and the finished product: how to brief properly, how to evaluate what you’re being told, how to spot trouble before it costs you, and how to hold your suppliers to a standard that actually protects your organisation.

Our editorial pillars are:

Hiring an Agency — Writing effective briefs, setting realistic budgets, evaluating proposals and credentials, understanding contracts and SLAs, and deciding when you need an agency at all versus an in-house team or a self-service platform.

Running a Project — What happens after the contract is signed. Scope creep, communication breakdowns, milestone reviews, handover standards, and keeping a build on the rails when priorities shift.

Hosting & Maintenance — The decisions most organisations make once and never revisit: where your site lives, who looks after it, what your support retainer actually covers, and how to tell whether your current arrangement is good enough.

Platforms — Honest, non-affiliated comparisons of content management systems, ecommerce platforms, subscription billing tools, and infrastructure options — written for people who need to make a decision, not people who want a technical deep-dive.

Commentary — Our view on what’s happening across the industry. Trends worth taking seriously, ones that aren’t, named criticism where it’s warranted, and the occasional opinion piece grounded in what we’ve actually seen on real projects.

Who produces this

Commissioning Desk is founded and produced by Kasper Polanski who has over a decade of experience at the lead of multiple creative agencies in the UK and EU. His agencies would work as the sole technical partner to organisations across education, healthcare, ecommerce, local government, and professional services. Other editors and contributors include agency founders and senior leadership, as well as marketing managers, operations leads, business owners, and anyone responsible for commissioning, managing, or evaluating digital projects and technology investments within their organisation.

This publication exists because the Commissioning Desk team kept encountering the same problems on the other side of the table: buyers who had been poorly advised, projects that had been badly scoped by a previous supplier, platforms chosen for the wrong reasons, and hosting arrangements that nobody had reviewed in years. Rather than keep solving these problems one client at a time, we decided to write about them properly and honestly.

Being run by current and past agency founders and senior executives means this publication is practitioner-informed — our contributors have built the things we write about, managed the projects we analyse, and made the mistakes we warn against. It also means we have a commercial perspective, and we’re transparent about that. Where agency experience is relevant to an article, we say so. Where our view differs from what might serve our commercial interests, we say that too. We will recommend a DIY platform when it’s the right answer. We will acknowledge when an agency isn’t needed. The publication is only useful if readers trust it, and readers will only trust it if we tell the truth even when it’s inconvenient.

Contributing

Commissioning Desk is not a closed shop. We publish contributed perspectives from agency owners, in-house digital leads, platform specialists, and anyone else with genuine practitioner experience to share. If you’ve learned something the hard way on a digital project and think others would benefit from hearing it, we’d like to talk to you.

We are not interested in vendor pitches, affiliate content, or AI-generated backlink-focused submissions. We are interested in honest accounts of what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d do differently — the kind of insight that only comes from having actually done the work.

If you’d like to contribute, get in touch via our contact page.

Editorial independence

Every article published on Commissioning Desk reflects the editorial judgement of its author and the publication’s editors. No contributor can influence coverage of any product, platform, or agency beyond the strength of the argument they make in their writing.

We do not accept payment for coverage. We do not run affiliate links. We do not adjust our recommendations based on commercial relationships. If we recommend something, it’s because we believe it’s the right answer for the reader. If we criticise something, it’s because we believe the criticism is warranted.

Our full editorial policy covers how we handle accuracy, named criticism, guest contributions, and complaints.