How can you monitor vendor performance across multiple projects or services?

Monitoring vendor performance, across multiple projects or service performance metrics is the key. From response time to issue resolution, clearing the benchmarks keep you aligned with vendors. Using advanced monitoring tools for real-time insights, Raising open communication with regular check-ins and feedback are crucial. Conducting performance reviews for project goals alignment, Prioritizing data security to regularly assess vendor’s protocols or anticipating the unexpected helps to create a crisis response plan. Building a culture of continuous improvement by encouraging innovation and sharing insights and Learning from others in the community is also helpful for successful vendor management.

Every project or engagement is different with a vendor and choosing the right metric and measuring is important. The metrics should be picked in such a way that they a meaningful, reportable, relatable to existing contracts we have with vendor and at same time not to just consolidate all the available metrics into one.

You need also to have clear business ownership and buy in of these metrics. Top leadership decide on a project. Which may then get passed into a function or department, who then pass it down to an existing team or set up a project team (if it's a larger project). They then take control and run with it, this is when the disconnects start. A very senior business owner must buy off the KPI / metrics to be used, before engaging any external vendors. They must then stay engaged with the team / project team, and create milestones where major decisions are reviewed, challenged, reviewed again and finally (if in line with business objectives, stated KPI / metrics) bought off, and the project moved towards the next major milestone decision.

Again these reviews must also be balanced against original business requirements, to ensure the outcome has not strayed from business need. Therefore strong senior business leadership & representation at these reviews are critical to its success. I have seen many decisions left to the project team, as fatigue, other business priorities set in and the senior leaders interest wain. They are then surprised to learn about scope creep (or more often scope / functionality decrease).

One area I think is neglected is the skills required via the vendors to run projects. This should be a key consideration and agreed upfront (business with vendor). Including in this the seniority level required - seen many times where a vendor has almost new hires. Who (quote) " are one step ahead of our people, in the project manual ''. Also soft skills need to be investigated, often technical skills are documented and sought after and yet often lacking are people (on both sides) with soft skills, to enable team working, iron out wrinkles, remove roadblocks, get through the red tape and procedures.