How do you balance vendor stakeholder interests and needs with your budget and timeline?

I view vendor stakeholders as individuals or organizations that provide products or services to the business and have a direct impact on the success of IT infrastructure projects. This can include hardware and software vendors, as well as service providers such as cloud computing providers, network providers, and security providers. To define vendor stakeholders, it's important to identify the vendors that are critical to the success of IT projects and to develop strong relationships with them. This involves understanding the vendor's business model, product or service offerings, and pricing strategy. It's also important to evaluate the vendor's capabilities, experience, and track record to ensure they can meet your business needs.

Part 2 Vendors will use a strategy to have the Project Manager removed from a Project if the Project Manager is doing their job keeping the vendor on track with the Agreement. The strategy is to work with those Senior Managers and let them know that "the Project Manager is being very difficult and is hurting our good relationship". This tactic is one that Project Managers must be on the lookout for and have a plan in place to respond to this vendor tactic. Just like the Project Stakeholder Management Plan - the Project Manager should NOT share the Vendor Stakeholder Management Plan.

In today's global operating environment, it is more important than ever that vendor stakeholders collaborate and maintain a line of communication to track goals, priorities, status and unplanned changes systematically.

Part 1 Vendor Stakeholders are more than just the vendor or vendors involved in your Project. While the Vendor is the primary stakeholder, one must investigate and document many things about the vendor and their relationships within your organization. Many vendors have a strategy to befriend senior management - even if those senior managers are not directly involved in the Project, they may have high influence, and due to their position within the organization will have high power.

Part 3 In the Contract, the Project Manager must be the single point of access to the Project and should manage their performance closely. This is not to say that the Vendor's team can not talk with the internal staff, just that the Project Manager must be aware of the interactions. When does Vendor Stakeholder management begin? At the point in time when it is determined that external resources are required for the Project. In other words, during the Initiation Phase (Business Case and Project Charter). This means, well before the Vendor selection is made. Vendors can bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the Project, but they can also have negative impacts on the 6 Project Constraints and therefore must be closely managed.

One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given: "When presenting your pitch, always know the reaction of the room before you go into it." You should be doing the research, building the connections, and customizing your storytelling based on what your vendor/stakeholders are saying. Often, just presenting your unchanged idea with different words or from a different perspective will be enough to gain advocacy. Further, your vendors and stakeholders likely have insights, data, and experience that, if incorporated, will improve results!

Stakeholder analysis needs to be an ongoing, BAU effort that is based on collaboration and communication. External vendors should use systematic tools available to them to promote the right information to the right users. The notion of sharing more information is risky is no longer true. On the contrary, transparency can help reach more users, enable more analysis, build trust and lead to successful releases.

In my experience, the vendor stakeholder analysis template should begin not with vendor information but internally covering all departments and levels across all regions. Having this level of information should enable each stakeholder to perform vendor analysis at enterprise and their own levels.

One should understand that vendor stakeholders are strategic partners and key components of any organization. By building strong relationships with vendors and managing them strategically, businesses can ensure that they have the right products and services to support their IT or their project needs, while also optimizing costs and improving performance.

In my experience, stakeholders were engaged after the fact. In reality stakeholders at all levels, regions and areas of the business should be participating in the innovation life-cycle process to ensure the right solutions at the right times.