Plan Vendor Manager Training
Posted on | March 23, 2010 | 1 Comment
In a traditional organization where all work is done internally, the employee collective talent, deployed against a planned set of roles, yields what Steven Goldberg (http://www.accero.com/trv) has defined as Total Realized Value. With employees managing outsourced functions and a set of external resources, this yield can be seen as “Total Leveraged Value”.
The more skilled employees are at managing vendors (or the sourcing and management chain), or the greater collective competency, the higher is the Leveraged Employee Value, and the greater the results will be for the company overall from employees and outsourcing.
An often overlooked area of planning in manager development is preparing professionals and other employees to manage vendors. This can be more evident in IT departments, because professionals have often received Project Management certification, which can incorrectly be seen as sufficient preparation to manage vendors. Project Management is only part of the overall capability required.
What often triggers the awareness that greater competency is required in the specific aspects of managing vendors is when delivery or relationship problems arise, there is visible waste, results and deliverables fall short, or vendors are felt to be in control or unresponsive.
When delivery or relationship problems arise, the required (or easy) fix may often be seen as a workshop or other form of training for the vendor managers. But during the training, when the vendor managers begin to review their work against the models and techniques presented, the inherent, systemic problems come into sharp focus.
Typical problems can include loose or inadequate definition of Service Levels, agreements that omit key assumptions, or absence of plans for ongoing requirements for vendors maintaining skills levels and knowledge of client processes. These inherent problems are not fixed by training Vendor Managers.
So, planning for training and building capabilities for Vendor Managers needs to be done as an upfront part of the overall outsourcing planning, and not as a response problems and issues arising once the work is already underway.
We have just added a new service – a detailed process and assessment for outsourcing competencies. You can read more at the Think180 site page, Capabilities for Managing Vendors
Tags: capabilities > competencies > manager development > managing vendors > planning > talent > Training
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One Response to “Plan Vendor Manager Training”
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May 7th, 2012 @ 8:05 am
We are having more of an issue with training those responsible for vendor deliverables dealing with the vendors and their late work than anything else. The lack of respect and lack of understanding re: how this work gets done is rampant and needs to be addressed.