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Demystifying the Statement of Work
In your project, Statements of Work (SOW’s) are where the rubber meets the road and unfortunately, many project managers don’t put as much work into them as they should. If there’s a conflict with your...
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A Few Hard Truths About Cloud Vendor SLA’s
From an IT perspective, cloud computing is amazing. Although, from a vendor management and contract management perspective, it’s not. Like a bad haunted house, it’s full of “gotchas” around every...
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Dealing with Difficult Vendors
How do you handle problematic vendors? What do you do to tackle the realm of difficult vendor personalities? In my former life, I was a teacher. So, when working with difficult vendors, I see them as...
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Walk Towards the Problem
I’ve been working towards my Lean certification and have been involved in a difficult, albeit amazing Lean project. I asked our Master Black Belt how we should approach a certain situation on the...
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Why Procurement Rocks!
Unfortunately, Procurement gets a bad rap in some organizations. This leads to a vicious cycle that plays out where Procurement is the “roadblock” to all this “great stuff” that’s happening in the...
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Rethinking Government Technology Procurement Processes
I saw this great post a few weeks ago on the Code for America website entitled “Help Us Procure Procurement Policies”. After reading the post and watching the video, I totally understand where these...
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Negotiating Vendor Cloud Computing Contracts
I stumbled across this phenomenal paper entitled Negotiating Cloud Contracts: Looking At Clouds From Both Sides Now, written by W. Kuan Hon, Christopher Millard and Ian Walden. It was published in...
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How Much Are You Paying Your Technology Vendors Upfront?
Too much? Some of you are thinking, “I don’t pay vendors a dime upfront!”. Some of you stopped and and thought, “Well, I did that before, but I’d never do it again.” And, some of you said, “Yeah,...
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Accepting Gifts From Vendors
A vendor that you’ve been working with gave you two highly coveted (and very expensive!) tickets for your favorite NFL / College Football team as a holiday thank you gift. Should you accept them?...
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Outwit, Outlast and Outplay Your Vendors
As most of you know, “Outwit, Outlast and Outplay” is the overarching theme from “Survivor“, the show where alliances are everything and it all comes down to one person winning a million dollars in a...
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Avoid Making Emotional Contract Decisions
A friend of mine is working through a difficult landlord / tenant situation. She signed the lease quickly, excited to move into the condo of her dreams. It’s close to the metro, has perfect square...
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Do you have a technology vendor management question?
The reason I started this blog was to provide a toolkit for those of you working with technology vendors, as there isn’t much out there on this topic, especially as it relates to vendor management,...
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Target’s Data Breach and its Impact on Technology Procurement
From the C suite down to the help desk, everyone will remember the Target data breach. However, many organizations think about security last when procuring software. They’re more concerned about speed...
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Unlimited Liability for Breach of Confidentiality in SaaS / Cloud Contracts
I recently opened up a contact form for readers if they had any questions about technology vendor management and I received this great question from a reader. It does step into the legal realm of...
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Is it a Software Evaluation or a Proof of Concept?
Many project managers and vendors use the terms “software evaluation” and “proof of concept” loosely, but in reality, they’re two separate types of engagements. These are the key differences between...
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Staying Relevant
A friend of mine recently mentioned that he was a “dinosaur” as we were discussing different mobile social media platforms. I started thinking, “How can we, as technology vendor management and...
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Becoming a Change Agent
What’s a “change agent”? Dennis Stevenson does a nice job of defining a change agent in his article “What is a ‘Change Agent’?” He states that “A change agent lives in the future not the present” [1]....
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Preventing a Cloud Data Breach
Many of you reading this have not (thankfully) experienced a cloud data breach with your technology vendors. However, a cloud data breach is always on the forefront as more businesses embrace cloud...
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Are You Using “Test” Data in the Cloud?
Yes, you read that correctly. The word test is in quotation marks, as in “is it really test data that you have in the vendor’s cloud?”. Astonishingly enough, at least 85% of financial institutions are...
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The Price of Innovation?
Image courtesy of Telephonica BMC sues ServiceNow. Cisco sues Arista. SAP / Ariba sues Coupa. Is this the ultimate price of innovation? Start ups are built with hunger, passion and innovation....
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