Procurement Lifecycle & Vendor Management
Throughout my career, the teams that I was part of had outsourced our work for the vendors to complete for us for various reasons — capability, to leverage on the vendor’s expertise, or to reach an existing group of audience who are followers of a popular influencer, etc. Working with vendors is more than just producing work in partnership with the vendor. Within the procurement lifecycle, there are behind-the-scene tasks to complete to source the vendor, draft agreements, negotiations, and contract execution before work can begin.
Below is a flowchart to illustrate the entire procurement lifecycle that I manage as a project manager. At Dolby, our team worked with 18 new vendors, which meant that I had gone through the entire lifecycle 18 times for that one company and many times over managing the purple section of the workflow for each Statement of Work both parties had agreed upon for the individual campaign that our team worked in partnership with each of the vendors.
I created the following flowchart in Confluence with specific steps for my team to follow since there are a few parties involved, and there is no room for errors. I included it as part of the team’s knowledgebase.