Vendors taking advantage
May 27, 2008 1:16 pm BusinessWe had a bit of a challenge in bringing a recent software upgrade project in on budget. The culprit was our vendors — a project management consulting firm advised us to secure signed contracts from them, but our managers insisted that a verbal agreement would be sufficient. But it wasn’t — and at the last minute several key vendors took advantage of the situation to change their prices significantly. They knew that they had us just where they wanted us — it was too late in the project lifecycle to select alternative vendors, so we were forced to accept their price increases. Fortunately, we were able to find other areas where we could reduce our costs, so we still brought the entire project in under budget — but we’ve learned our lesson with this one: from now on, everyone gets a signed contract.