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Vendor Management: Balancing strong relationships and accountability

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Srikana Ray
Community Champion
Project Professional, PMP

As project managers and project professionals, we often need to balance strong vendor relationships, contractual obligations, performance expectations, timelines, cost and quality.

What strategies have you found most effective for building strong, collaborative relationships with vendors while still maintaining accountability for deliverables and performance?

How do you handle situations where a vendor is underperforming, missing deadlines, or requesting changes without damaging a relationship that may be important to the project or organization?

I would like to hear your experiences, lessons learned and practical approaches that have worked well for you.
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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Srikana, I would question whether strong vendor relationships and accountability necessarily need to be balanced as competing objectives.
A mature relationship may be strong precisely because difficult performance conversations can happen without becoming adversarial.

For me, the first step when performance deviates is to establish what actually caused the deviation.
A missed milestone may reflect supplier performance, but it may also involve changing requirements, unresolved dependencies, delayed client decisions, or several interacting causes.
Systemic explanation should not become supplier exoneration, but neither should accountability become premature attribution of blame.

I would also distinguish a vendor requesting a change from a vendor underperforming.
A change request may be entirely legitimate and should be evaluated through the appropriate governance process rather than treated as evidence of poor performance.

Perhaps the real test of the relationship is whether both parties can make commitments, deviations, causes and consequences visible, address them proportionately, and escalate when necessary without accountability becoming blame or collaboration becoming avoidance of accountability.
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1 reply by Srikana Ray
Sep 29, 2026 7:12 PM
Srikana Ray
...
Thank you for sharing your insights. I agree with your perspective. At times a vendor repeatedly misses deadlines or does not adhere to the contract objectives or resource obligations and that is when it becomes challenging to manage the relationship with the vendor.
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Lissette Indhira Pimentel Sosa
Community Champion
Program Manager| HARPER SRL Santo Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
A good vendor relationship doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations. I try to make expectations, deliverables, and responsibilities clear from the beginning and address issues when they first appear rather than waiting until they become serious.

I think vendors usually respond better when the conversation is based on what was agreed, what is happening now, and what needs to change, rather than only raising the issue when a deadline has already been missed.
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Verónica Elizabeth Pozo Ruiz RYLAI Access Control Quito, Pichincha, Ecuador
A good relationship with a vendor or contractor begins with carefully establishing the type of contract and its terms and conditions.

Subsequently, proper monitoring of the procurement process makes it possible to verify that all deliverables provided by the contractor meet the requirements.

If disagreements arise over matters not stipulated in the contract, negotiation tactics should be used to reach a mutually favorable understanding.
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Srikana Ray
Community Champion
Project Professional, PMP
Sep 15, 2026 12:44 PM
Replying to Luis Branco
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Srikana, I would question whether strong vendor relationships and accountability necessarily need to be balanced as competing objectives.
A mature relationship may be strong precisely because difficult performance conversations can happen without becoming adversarial.

For me, the first step when performance deviates is to establish what actually caused the deviation.
A missed milestone may reflect supplier performance, but it may also involve changing requirements, unresolved dependencies, delayed client decisions, or several interacting causes.
Systemic explanation should not become supplier exoneration, but neither should accountability become premature attribution of blame.

I would also distinguish a vendor requesting a change from a vendor underperforming.
A change request may be entirely legitimate and should be evaluated through the appropriate governance process rather than treated as evidence of poor performance.

Perhaps the real test of the relationship is whether both parties can make commitments, deviations, causes and consequences visible, address them proportionately, and escalate when necessary without accountability becoming blame or collaboration becoming avoidance of accountability.
Thank you for sharing your insights. I agree with your perspective. At times a vendor repeatedly misses deadlines or does not adhere to the contract objectives or resource obligations and that is when it becomes challenging to manage the relationship with the vendor.
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Abolfazl Yousefi Darestani Manager, Quality and Continuous Improvement| Hörmann-TNR Industrial Doors Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
I agree with Luis.

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