What we solve ·Should I approve what is on my desk?
Vanguard · Guide
How do you question a vendor without being technical?
My team signs service agreements we cannot enforce afterwards.
So that your team can question a vendor without being technical, with the script built on your own contract.
Workshop: how to audit your vendorSend this page to whoever decides
This sounds like you if
- The vendor's monthly report arrives in a format that does not allow any cross checking.
- A service review is coming and the vendor's report is written not to be questioned.
- You inherited vendors you did not choose and did not negotiate.
Use this today, without hiring anyone
The five questions in the script. Take them to your next service review and the tone of the meeting will change. What does not fit here is reading your contract to know which of the five is enforceable and which is not.
- "Is that availability for the component or for the service?" The vendor measures their servers; you live on your people being able to work. The two numbers can differ a lot and both be true.
- "Show me the 95th percentile, not the average." A monthly average hides the worst day of the month, which is usually closing day.
- "When does the response clock start: when I open the ticket or when you accept it?" That interval is measured in no agreement and it is usually the longest one.
- "How many cases were left out of this measurement, and why?" Every metric has exclusions. The ones not written into the contract are the ones that will send your claim back.
- "If this month misses, what exactly happens and who triggers it?" If the answer does not include an amount, a date and a name, there is no obligation: there is an expectation.
How we solve it
The method, not the promise.
- Your service reports and your contract get read before the session. The workshop is not generic: it gets built on what is yours.
- The areas of the agreement where an obligation looks clear and its enforceability depends on how it was drafted get reviewed.
- The group works on real anonymized reports and finds on its own what is missing. This is learned by doing it.
- It gets cross checked against the client's own reports and the concrete gaps appear.
- It closes by fixing the three things this client will demand at their next review, with the exact definition of each metric.
What you receive
- The one page question script, adapted to your contract.
- The list of metrics you should start demanding, with the exact definition of each one.
- The three concrete things to ask for at your next service review.
- The workshop material, so you can run it internally for whoever did not attend.
The proof that applies here
- 19 years in both chairs: service agreements sold from HPE and IBM, bought and enforced from Citi.
- Operations leadership under regulatory supervision for eight years without an audit finding.
- Major incident command, where you see what a green dashboard actually means.
Before you hire
You come out with the judgment to ask, not with the evidence to claim: reconstructing real performance from your logs is separate work and gets contracted separately.
A workshop on how to question a vendor is only worth it if it is run by someone who sat on the side that answers. Here it is run by the person who wrote those agreements to sell them and then enforced them as a customer.
Which metric in your last service report would you not be able to explain if someone challenged it?
If the problem is a different one
The vendor's dashboard shows green and the operation keeps going down.
Vendor contract and performance audit
The business case was built by the person selling it to me.
Investment verdict
I have a call to make this week and almost everyone with an opinion has something to gain from the answer.
Verdict Session