Vendor Management

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Essence

Effective vendor management hinges on clear communication, meticulous contract management, and strategic relationship-building. It begins with thorough vendor selection, ensuring alignment with organisational goals and stringent evaluation of capabilities. Once vendors are onboarded, maintaining transparent communication channels and clearly defined expectations becomes paramount, facilitating mutual understanding and collaboration.

Continuous performance monitoring and risk assessment are essential for identifying and addressing potential issues promptly, fostering a proactive approach to risk management. Moreover, cultivating positive relationships based on trust and cooperation encourages vendors to adapt to evolving needs and drive continuous improvement in service delivery. Skilled vendor managers also prioritise ethical conduct, financial prudence, and effective dispute resolution to sustain productive and ethical vendor relationships while optimising operational efficiencies and achieving organisational objectives.

Experience

I've been managing vendors for over a decade. It started at Lloyds when they began to offshore their testing capabilities to TCS. Clear communications was key, a need to convey expectations, create appropriate measures of performance and establish feedback loops.

At Rabobank I worked closely with Temenos to resolve configuration issues and real or perceived defects. I established a regular cadence meeting with them and put time and effort into making sure there was a clear and precise articulation of the issue. A log of conversations and actions was kept and this paid dividends when issues needed to be escalated.

More recently, I've been working with a Microsoft partner, and focusing on building trust into the relationship has yielded great results. Sometimes you don't have the skills within the team to carefully detail the requirements up front. In these cases, you need to choose a vendor that puts the relationship first, and transparency and openness is part of their DNA. Reciprocity however is expected and the openness means that problems are shared and the risk of delay or escalating costs remain with the project. Regardless, it is prudent to understand that a large vendor usually has the depth of experience to avoid over promising what they can deliver, and their obligations are always mitigated with carefully constructed wording in the contract.

Credentials