Creative vendor management

Good day...

Have you ever faced a serious challenge in managing your vendor in your project? This is particularly frustrating when you have a tight deadline, strong dependencies, and limited resources to manage.

In my experience, I found the following tips to be useful in managing a vendor creatively.

Picture credit: stux

1. Treat your vendor equally with your other team members. In most cases, vendors delivering a product / service to you, or working as part of your team, would appreciate when they are being treated as core part of your team and when you apply an equal treatment. They would appreciate acknowledgement to their achievements. In my organization, the vendors are always invited to team events, including company's offsite meetings.

2. Build a positive and strong relationship with the vendor's senior management. In the case that the vendor's team member is not performing well, you can easily gain support from their higher management and in many cases obtain priority over other clients they are working for.

3. Escalate appropriately. When you feel that you do not receive the necessary attention from your vendor, the best action is to escalate to your management. You will be surprised on how conversation at a higher level make a positive influence to how the tasks are delivered by your vendor. It is best when you are involved in the discussion, hence, you can secure the commitment from your vendor in front of your higher management.

4. Be fair. What I mean here is that we need to make sure that you and your organization fulfill your obligation to the vendors and showing goodwill in achieving common benefit. In most cases, this translates to settling their invoice on timely manner, issuing work order and purchase order as committed, signing an acceptance document immediately after work completion, providing appropriate input and feedback, and recommending the vendor to your colleagues or other organizations.

In my experience, once we are being fair and sincere to our vendors, they will show gesture of goodwill in return.

In any case, it is always best to apply a principle of carefulness towards each term and condition stated in work order or contractual agreement. Out-of-pocket expenses, acceptance criteria, definition of done, and criteria for change requests are potential area of dispute in many projects. Being specific, clear, and transparent on those terms is always encouraged to minimize dispute.

Edwin