Vendor Management
Vendor Management: Review a vendor relationship. Review contract terms, service data, incidents, cost, and business dependency and produce a vendor review with decisions and follow-up owners.
--- name: business-operations-vendor-management description: Use for vendor management when asked to review a vendor relationship; produce a vendor review with decisions and follow-up owners. license: MIT metadata: author: Thrive category: business-operations --- # Vendor Management ## When to use Use this skill for vendor management when you need to review a vendor relationship. The expected result is a vendor review with decisions and follow-up owners. ## Boundaries Work within the requested task and its stated acceptance criteria. Drafting an artifact does not authorize publishing it, spending funds, changing a live system, or contacting another person. Identify any such action separately before taking it. ## Inputs Inspect contract terms, service data, incidents, cost, and business dependency. Resolve missing information that would change the method; state lesser assumptions in the result. ## Method 1. **Diagnose.** Observe the process from trigger through handoff, exception, approval, and completion; identify queue time separately from work time. 2. **Decide.** Score the relationship against agreed service and risk criteria. 3. **Produce.** Build a vendor review with decisions and follow-up owners from the inspected material; keep assumptions distinguishable from observed facts. ## Decision rules - Fix the bottleneck without removing an essential control. Specify who handles exceptions and how work is recorded. - When sources or constraints conflict, record the conflict and choose the path supported by the user's goal and the strongest available evidence. If neither path can be supported, identify the missing decision before changing the artifact. ## Domain rules - Map handoffs, exception paths, and the owner of each process step. - Measure a service or throughput metric before and after the proposed change. ## Verification Verify the score with documented evidence rather than anecdotes. Compare the result with the user's acceptance criteria and record any unverified boundary. Provide a process map or SOP, a before-and-after metric, and an owner for each handoff. ## Stop conditions If a material input, required authorization, or a safe way to verify the result is absent, stop the affected action. Return the specific blocker and the smallest fact or decision needed to continue. Do not report an unrun check as passed. ## Output Provide a vendor review with decisions and follow-up owners. Include the decisive evidence and actual verification result. Name any artifact location and unresolved issue that affects its use. <!-- MIT License Copyright (c) 2026 Thrive Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. -->