Third-party Management Toolkit

Goal of third-party management

Third-party management aims to ensure that the third parties engaged by the organization as well as the services they provide, meet business requirements. In this way, the goal is to maximize the value obtained from these services. 

"Third-Party Management" and "Supplier Management" terms are often used interchangeably in IT contexts. 

Third-party management is one of the weakest links in IT Service Delivery.  Often organizations don’t assign enough resources to manage important suppliers and contracts. Contractual obligations are often not known by key IT staff, leading to uncontrolled supplier activities. We have prepared an ITIL compliant third-party management toolkit that will help you to design and improve your process and practices. The third-party management toolkit doesn’t include just headings, it includes also explanations, definitions and how-to paragraphs, and also templates that you can adapt to your organizational and regulatory requirements.

The third-party management toolkit covers following topics:

• Establishment and maintenance of third-party and contract information system
• Definition of new third-party and contract requirements including business case and main topics to be covered by an RFP
• Evaluation and selection of new third-party and contracts
• Establishing contracts
• Managing third-party relationships
• Formal and structured communication
• Monitoring and assessing supplier performance
• Third-party risk management

Toolkit content

1. Template for a business case
2. Template for Supplier and Contract Catalogue
3. Template for Supplier Risk Management
4. Template for Supplier Performance Assessment 
5. Process documentation covering explanations of 
   • important concepts such as supplier & contract catalogue, supplier categorization methods, supplier and contract information systems 
   • Process activities
   • Roles and Responsibilities
   • RACI matrix
   • Examples of KPIs

 Toolkit attributes

• 1 x Process documentation (Word) - 25 pages
• 1 x Business case (Excel) 
• 1 x Third-party risk template (Excel)
• 1 x Third-party contract catalogue template (Excel)
• 1 x Third-party performance assessment template (Excel)

Third-party management process documentation

If you want to conduct a self-assessment or to be prepared for an audit, then refer to our Third-party Management Audit Checklist 

For the key roles in third-party management process, check the blog:

Key Roles in Third-Party Management

For the risks while managing third-party, check the blog:

Third-party Management Risks

In order to understand why you need a checklist for auditing a third-party, check the blog:

Why You Need an IT Third-Party Audit Checklist