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Warning: stop letting vendors run your quarterly reviews
I sat in on 3 vendor reviews last month at our Chicago office and they all skipped the SLA breach data. They just showed happy charts. If you're not pulling your own metrics before the meeting, you're getting a sales pitch not an ops review.
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charliew994mo ago
Yeah exactly, I learned this the hard way after sitting through a vendor review where they claimed 99.9% uptime but my internal logs showed three separate outages that took down our payment portal for like 45 minutes each. When I called them out on it they tried to say the SLA definition was different for "scheduled maintenance windows" even though none of those were scheduled. So now what I do is pull our incident tickets from the last quarter, match them against their reported uptime, and flag any discrepancies before the meeting even starts. I also screenshot their dashboards during the review so if they try to change the numbers later I've got proof. It takes maybe 30 minutes extra prep but it saves me from getting sold a story instead of getting real service data.
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xena9464mo ago
Wait, did you mention Chicago? Ive worked with vendors in Chicago before and yeah they always try to gloss over the bad stuff with shiny slides. The thing is, most vendors contract language actually requires them to report SLA breaches if they hit a certain threshold, but they bury that in the fine print. So if youre not pulling your own numbers before the meeting, youre basically letting them control the story. I usually run a quick audit on the key metrics an hour before the call just so I can catch any gaps theyre hoping Ill miss. Its a pain but it beats sitting through a sales pitch dressed up as a quarterly review.
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