Vendor PM Challenge

In 25 years of my project management career, I have been hired by both client and vendor organizations. And clearly, the two experiences are very different.

Typically, as the vendor PM, you are exposed to more stress. It usually starts after the sales team of your organization does everything possible and impossible to sell your company’s product or service. Most of the time, they overpromise or even overcommit. And once the sale is done, they move on to a new prospect, leaving you with a statement of work to which you and your team barely contributed - yet the client holds you accountable for every single word of it. Sadly, this is the reality. The serious challenge is to deliver the project so that the client is fully satisfied.

I am not going to bother you with the obvious explanations about the discrepancy between the deliverables promised to a client and what a vendor can actually produce. The techniques for addressing those deserve a separate article, which I will probably write another day.

What makes me wonder is why some well-established vendors completely exclude the client side of the project when selling their product or service - or even when planning the project implementation.

A few years ago, I was working with a large corporation. A vendor approached them at a conference with what appeared to be a magical IT solution - something that looked truly impressive. After several iterations, the deal was made and the contract was signed.

The vendor was thrilled. They said: “We can complete the project in six months. Here is our project plan.”

I looked at their plan. There was absolutely no consideration of any lags on the client side. The plan assumed that whenever they needed input from the client’s IT, business department, or any other stakeholder, it would be available instantly. The project schedule was estimated solely based on the vendor’s activity durations and interdependencies. They did not ask questions about our team’s availability, potential risks, or any technology constraints that could affect their plan.

When we got together as a team, I pointed out that our database resources were only available ten percent of their time over the next two months, and that one of the on-prem servers they planned to connect to was undergoing a major upgrade.

With that in mind, we had to work out a new plan that extended the timeline from six months to seven. That was the very best we could do after engaging an alternate environment for testing and minimizing the DBA’s scope of work.

Vendor PM Challenge - PMAID Consulting Group

Then I asked them another question: “What is your definition of done? Is the project completed when you deliver your technical solution, or when the designated group of users tries it and approves its quality?”

If we are talking about the latter, then what about the training program, tool configuration, and change management activities?

To be fair, the vendor did a brilliant job and delivered a quality product that was deployed across the organization - well, in ten months.

Another case that falls into the same category of vendor planning issues happened in a different organization. A vendor was going to test their product with one of our teams. The project involved hardware delivery, software installation, and user training. The users were expected to have very specific skill sets.

I was assigned to this project, and during my first introductory call with the vendor, I learned that they were coming from across the border the following week to perform the hardware installation, and that their trainer was arriving two days later.

There was clearly a miscommunication. After studying the project history, I learned that the vendor had been assured by our management that everything would be ready for the hardware installation. Somehow, the vendor assumed that the software would also be ready, and that the users would be available for training for two weeks in a row. That was a wrong assumption: the software was not ready, and the system users had not even been hired.

As a vendor project manager, you should be planning for both teams - yours and the client’s. You must account for all dependencies and risks and assign activities accordingly, in cooperation with the client. That is the ultimate key to delivery success.