Last week, I named two disciplines mid-market skips when modernizing a revenue platform: scope discipline and vendor management. (If you haven’t read Issue #1 yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s golden.) The vendor-management piece could, to a careful reader, read like an indictment. It isn't. The vendor isn't the adversary. The vendor runs a business where margin is the score, and your organization is just one account among many.
What turns that reality from risk to partnership is the same thing that turns any business relationship from risk to partnership: a shared operating manual, agreed before the work starts.
Five questions form the filter. Ask them before the SOW is signed. Ask the right person, not the salesperson. Write down the answers. The shape of the filter, more than any single answer, is what shifts the relationship from negotiated to disciplined.
Question 1: Whose language is the scope written in?
The first SOW draft is almost always written in the vendor's language — their methodology terms, their acceptance categories, their delivery vocabulary. That isn't malicious. It's faster. They write 5 SOWs a quarter; you wrote 1 this year.
Right-answer pattern: A second pass on the scope, rewritten in your operational vocabulary and your company’s voice, which is then reviewed together, can retain both versions. Where the language diverges, surface the divergence and pick one. The act of harmonizing the language usually surfaces the assumption gaps that would have become change orders later. Reduce the change orders and get a product that matches your organizational voice?
That’s what we call a win!
Question 2: Who writes the acceptance criteria?
If the vendor writes the test cases, the platform passes them. This isn't deception. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy of predictable outcomes, consequences of asking one party to define the bar for their own work. Nostradamus would be proud.
Right-answer pattern: Your team writes the acceptance criteria — even if the vendor's implementation lead suggests them. The implementation lead is invaluable as a contributor; they should not be the author. Tie each acceptance criterion to a business outcome that a non-IT executive could verify.
If a criterion only the vendor can interpret, rewrite it.
Question 3: What's the change-order discipline?
Change orders are not a vendor problem. Change orders are a process. The question is whether that process produces a paper trail that your steering committee can audit at month nine.
Right-answer pattern: Every change order, regardless of size, gets: 1) a written rationale, 2) a delta cost, 3) a delta schedule, and 4) a named approver on both sides. The vendor maintains the master log; you maintain a mirror. Keep it visible. Reconcile monthly. The mirror exists not because you distrust the vendor; it exists because two-party reconciliation surfaces small drift early, before it becomes a quarterly surprise.
Question 4: What does a clean exit look like?
The question that gets asked last, if at all. The relationship is being built; the off-ramp is uncomfortable to discuss. Ask anyway.
Right-answer pattern: Three things named at signing: data ownership (yours, in your formats, exportable in under two weeks), intellectual property on configurations and customizations (yours, with the vendor retaining patterns and frameworks), and a knowledge-transfer protocol (this is a MUST HAVE, documented in the SOW, not promised. Otherwise, who will support when the vendor is no longer there?). The vendor who declines to answer this question clearly is not the vendor you want for a multi-year engagement.
The vendor who answers it cleanly is signaling exactly the partnership posture you're looking for.
Question 5: What's the steering cadence?
Vendor relationships fail in the spaces between meetings. The cadence is the connective tissue. It is also the lever that lets executives surface concerns before they become escalations.
Right-answer pattern: Weekly tactical (delivery lead to your IT lead), monthly steering (vendor partner to your senior leadership), quarterly business review (vendor account team to your executive sponsor). Each cadence has a named output. Tactical produces a status log. Steering produces a decision log. Business review produces a forward-looking commitment. Skip any of the three, and the relationship loses calibration.
What the filter prevents
These five questions don't prevent every vendor problem. They prevent the specific failure mode in which, six months into a 24-month engagement, neither side can provide a clear answer to the question "what did we agree to?"
The vendors who run the most successful mid-market engagements want these questions. They make the relationship easier on both sides. The vendors who don't want these questions are signaling the kind of partnership you would not have chosen if you had read the signal earlier.
The shape of the filter is the partnership.
The answers are the contract.
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Have a vendor relationship that worked, or one that didn't? Reply — I read every one.