The Secrets of Successful Vendor Management – 15 PDU’s

Without question, vendors and contractors are important members of project teams – and using them brings significant risks into your projects or operations. Whether it be to augment your staff or to provide knowledge and skills that your organization doesn’t (yet!) possess, vendors and contractors contribute significantly to your project’s success, your organization’s performance, and to your own reputation.

Your success hinges on selecting the right vendor and managing the relationship. This course provides the tools and techniques necessary to assist you in selecting, contracting and managing your vendors and contractors. Subjects include:

·                     Vendor selection best practices

·                     Most common contract types and key terms

·                     Negotiating meaningful Service Level Agreements

·                     Identifying vendor/contractor risks and effective mitigation and continency plans

·                     Tying deliverables to contracts

·                     Key metrics and scorecards

·                     Managing the contract

·                     Service recoveries, disagreements and contractual issues

·                     Deliverable signoffs

·                     Developing a successful partnership culture with contractors and vendors

·                     Ensuring consistency between projects and across your organization

·                     Contract close-out

It’s important to understand this relationship from both the buyer and the seller points of view. Created and delivered by Sue Glaskey, PMLG’s Executive Program Director, this course reflects the best practices, tools and techniques that she used as both a customer (buyer) of vendor and contractor services for over 20 years, as well as several years spent as both an individual contractor and in various roles at both small and large, international technology and service vendors.

This course is recommended for anyone that works with outside personnel, whether that be large outsourcers, smaller vendors, or individual contractors. Its tools and concepts can be applied to those supporting projects, product development, IT work, operations and any type of staff augmentation.