ABSTRACT
Vendors can be significant partners in your information technology (IT) project. They may create, deliver, install, maintain, or support critical components of your target state. That being the case, implicit in your reliance on the vendors are one or more of the following:
• High-performance hardware, software, resources, or support • On-time delivery • Technical expertise • Fast and thorough fault resolution • Training • Professional relations with your team, customers, and beneficiaries
This chapter has been written to address these expectations. As great as they are, they may be unrealistic. Having served on both sides of the fence in these relationships, it is my observation that vendor management from a project perspective is generally clumsy and haphazard. If true, that tends to make these relationships less beneficial and rewarding to both parties. Working on the assumption that we, as customers, cannot fix any vendor problems, we can still be aware of them and leverage that knowledge to our advantage. We can also acknowledge that large corporations generally make for lousy customers, whether through arrogance, incompetence, carelessness, or sheer size. The same faults can be attributed to many of our vendors, by the way.
