“The simple answer to your vendor problem is ” or “This one is easy – ALL companies do x”. My personal favorite – “just tell them what to do – after all, they are only a vendor”

The second key factor of vendor and partner management is proper Technical Planning and Management. Costly and unnecessary gaps emerge once the contracts are signed and the technical teams are ready to engage. These gaps can be mitigated by proper management of vendors or partners by the IT departments through technical planning. In many organizations, management of vendors by IT is uncommon. However, there is value with IT owning the tactical planning activities due to the fact that the resources generally understand how to traverse the organization, including network, security, and environment alignments. By definition, technical planning and management is the set of activities to enable the engineers to complete the technical activities of a project including requirements gathering, design, development, testing and deployment. Some activities included in this group:

• Environmental connectivity of vendor/partner and IT systems for development and test
• Flow through test ID creation across all systems
• Analysis and design documentation – do the vendor and IT teams agree on one common process to signoff on interfaces and designs?
• Onboarding new hardware – what is the schedule for new hardware within the vendor and your IT department?
• Deployment planning – how does and what schedules does the vendor keep and how will it impact the IT organization?

The rewards reaped by building new relationships across organizations are the honeymoon. The tactical alignment and delivery activities require appropriate planning, negotiation and effort. Together partners that acknowledge and work together through deep tactical planning and management may yield sustaining value and help avoid costly divorces down the road.