Its unfortunate when a customer/vendor relationship goes to the dogs and sometimes it can be detrimental for the parties involved.

That’s the situation my company is in right now. We have a service provider who has allowed (as we have as well) the relationship to come to such a point where both sides spend more time posturing and bickering than they do maintaining a healthy, productive business relationship.

I was brought on to the project about a year ago, to oversee the security of a migration from an old platform to a new one. We’ve been on the old platform for four years now and it is rapidly becoming unstable, which further aggravates the situation, as everyone is anxious to get off the dying system onto a new one.

However, over the course of the relationship we’ve increasingly found that the technical competence of the vendor is severely lacking, to say the least. Why didn’t we change vendors sooner? Well that question I can’t answer because, unfortunately it is made at a much higher level than my position and there is a fair amount of non-technical influence on the decision and its a mission-critical service, therefore any change is heavily resisted.

So what makes a business relationship so dysfunctional? For starters, a vendor who strong-arms the customer in any way. The vendor exists solely to provide a service to their customer. That’s how they make money that puts food on their table. Its up to the customer to dictate the needs of the customer and the vendor is responsible for negotiating the best course of action to meet those needs. However, in our particular case, the project manager on the vendor’s side has completely lost site of that fact.

For example; we are in the last stages of testing the migration plan and the vendor springs something on us last minute that has serious security implications. They want us to establish a domain trust right across the Internet, without a VPN and also grant one of their consultants domain admin access. Our enterprise admin emailed the entire team requesting a technical discussion the very next day, in order to discuss viable alternatives and this is the project manager’s response (edited only to conceal company names):

This invite says Wednesday. Do you mean today? We need to do this TODAY rather than wait until tomorrow. We have a consultant [SNIP] on site that’s unable to accomplish *anything* until approvals to move forward.

We then got together on our side to see if we could indeed get together that very day but were unable to for several reasons including the fact that we needed time to explore viable alternatives on our side before going to the meeting. After letting them know we weren’t available that very day, we got this response from one of their directors (again edited to conceal company names):

This cannot wait until tomorrow – we are already losing time. If you guys will not provide the privileges that were agreed to and signed off on previously (after which we tested in lab), then the current migration is off – we will have to start over with [snip], lab the entire thing up again – re-deploying the new production environment as a lab, and then rebuilding the new production environment again (after the new lab is complete).

The existing production platform is already creaking – I can’t over emphasize the risk for your business.

Please make every attempt to pull together the appropriate people for a discussion as early today as possible – this is an urgent matter.

Now, they say we’ve signed off to what their asking for but that’s not entirely true. We did sign off on a trust between the domains and we did sign off on granting the vendor whatever privileges are needed to accomplish their task. However, we didn’t sign off on piping our domain communications across the public Internet without a VPN and we didn’t sign off on giving a third party consultant the keys to the kingdom.

After requesting that the consultant at least try the migration test with only a subset of full admin rights, the list of those rights was in fact provided to us by the consultant, we were blamed for stalling progress. The project manager cancelled a meeting with our IT directors with the following message:

Cancelling today’s joint conference call – We are waiting on your decision regarding continuing originally approved migration process.

So rather than having the call and discussing the situation with all of our directors, they have closed down communications entirely, pending our “decision,” which has already been made; they need to try the migration test with a subset of privileges.

As of this writing we’re still waiting to hear if they will attempt the migration test (yes, we’re still testing, so I see no reason why we can’t test during the test). We’ve puffed out our chests and said if it isn’t done our way its the highway. Hopefully we’re prepared to back that statement.

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