Everything we have written on vendor & partner.

The vendor business review is the most under-engineered meeting in most platform operations. It happens quarterly, it follows a slide template that has not changed since the contract was signed, and it measures lagging indicators that tell you what already went wrong rather than leading indicators that predict what is about to.

The single edition in this cluster redesigns the vendor performance cycle from first principles. The cycle has four phases: planning (setting expectations and success criteria before the review period), execution (tracking leading indicators during the period), review (structured assessment against the scorecard) and action (specific, time-bound remediation or escalation decisions).

The scorecard itself measures across four dimensions: delivery quality (are outputs meeting acceptance criteria), responsiveness (are SLAs and communication standards being met), capability development (is the vendor investing in the skills the programme needs next), and relationship health (are escalation paths working and are disputes being resolved constructively). Each dimension carries leading and lagging KPIs. The leading indicators, like time-to-acknowledge for critical issues, or percentage of resources with current platform certifications, are the ones that actually predict risk.

ServiceNow vendor management at this level is risk governance. The Manual treats external partners as an extension of the platform operating model rather than a procurement exercise. The review cadence, scorecard structure and KPI selection are designed to surface problems before they become contractual disputes.