Manage Multiple Vendors

International projects struggle because of multiple vendors. One way to approach this subject is to manage each vendor separately. This can be risky because you are paying enough attention to the interaction among the vendors. Knowing in advance that there can be many problems in having vendors deal peer-to-peer with each other, consider separating this out as a subproject that gets individual attention. What can go wrong?

Each vendor will tell you a different story. If you are involved in the interface, you don’t know what happened.
No one vendor is in charge so none step up to the plate and take responsibility.
If there is a meeting and a vendor is missing, the other vendors may jump on this and blame the problems on the missing vendor.

As its own project, it requires each vendor to provide a contact lead person who will take responsibility. You will want to generate and track issues as well as progress here as well. In some projects we have had in the past, over 40% of our time was spent in this area.