vendor management

Your vendor built the infrastructure and your team now operates it. Infrastructure is a running system, not a deliverable, so a contract that ends at handover moves the expensive half of the work without the knowledge. The three arrangements that do work, the six handover artifacts that transfer real capability, the rebuild test as an acceptance gate, and what an in-house engineer can push for from below.

Three to six months into a retainer with nothing to show for it: why flat rankings are the wrong reason to fire an SEO agency and no shipped work is the right one, an eight-point audit you can run in an afternoon, how to tell a bad agency from a bad brief, and the account-ownership exit checklist almost everyone forgets.

Pen tests cause outages when nobody agreed the scope, the window or the stop button. A buyer guide to rules of engagement, written authorisation, cloud provider policies from AWS, Microsoft and Google, SOC deconfliction, and the categories where the safe answer is no.

You inherited an offshore dev team that misses everything while the status deck stays green. Four different causes look identical from the outside, and each has a different fix. The week-by-week turnaround playbook: the Week 0 tests that tell them apart, the metrics that beat the status report, and the go/no-go call in Week 6.

Everything through the account manager, nobody raises concerns, people disappear mid-sprint. It is not culture. Here is the org chart, the appraisal chain and the utilisation maths behind large-consultancy offshore behaviour, and what an in-house engineer can actually do about it.

A buyer’s guide for SaaS founders whose support is eating the team: the trigger points worth acting on, the three outsourcing models and what each really costs, the tier-1 versus product-knowledge split, pricing models read as incentives, a 60-day pilot, and the admin-panel access review most teams never run.