All projects have a customer/supplier environment, but they have a different set of characteristics if the supplier is not internal. If the company is commerical or the project is dealing with more than one company there are more factors to consider.
✔ Mutually beneficial relationship for achieving both the project's business case and the the company's. Many organisations create 'Invitations to tender' (ITT) to exclude small companies and only consider the larger, more experienced organisations. However, these companies usually care more about profit than they do about the needs of the project.
✔ Using a Work Break Downstructure, click here for more on this. This allows the planning to divide the deliverables into contract groups.
✔ Planning requires more detail and more work up front to figure out what contracts are required and what is required in them. This can be very time consuming.
✔ How will board-level meetings be arranged? Board meetings with all companies with the suppliers, and in some situations it will be inappropriate for suppliers to hear, so must not be present.
✔ The visibility of key documents such as the risk register. It is usually advisable to allow everybody to see this so people can stay vigilant. This requires asking suppliers to sign a non-disclosure agreement as opposed to hiding things.
✔ How will the suppliers' work practises integrate in with your own. This involves going into the strategies , such as version control in the Configuration Management Strategy. If this is not known at the time it will be added in detail later on.
