· 1 min read
Vendor Management Playbook: Contracts, SLAs, and Accountability
Vendor relationships fail when expectations stay polite. Build a playbook that prices risk and rewards clarity.
Vendors rarely wake up wanting to underperform. They respond to the incentives you set and the clarity you provide. A playbook stops the drift.
Problem: paper without behavior
- Contracts describe deliverables but ignore how decisions are made.
- SLAs measure uptime, not delivery predictability.
- Accountability is a meeting, not a consequence.
Solution: four plays
- Performance currency: Pay on capability delivered, quality gates passed, and decision latency reduced—not hours burned.
- SLA portfolio: Track uptime, defect escape rate, backlog churn, and change success rate. Publish weekly so excuses die fast.
- Escalation muscle: Pre-agree on a 48-hour escalation ladder with named contacts and the authority they hold. Use it before crises, not after.
- Runway visibility: Map dependencies and renewal dates together. A vendor without future visibility will hedge and slow-roll.
Smart conclusions
- Make the joint backlog public; secrecy breeds padding.
- Tie contract extensions to measurable improvements in cycle time and incident response.
- If you cannot see the vendor’s decision tree, you are the dependency, not the client.
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