Warning: stop letting vendors run your quarterly reviews

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.