I am a project manager in the public sector with a software developer background.
We have a very high budget project in progress, and we facing the following problem:
Our supplier delivers project products just in time. Unfortunately, they work is in very poor quality, so we need to reject the acceptance and then we make a lot of replies and hints to the supplier. After they build our reflections into the stuff, they send it back, but the result is still not reach our expectations. So we reply again. And again.
Finally, the project just flush over it’s planned finish line, almost two times now. My staff has other responsibilites meanwhile, taking part in other projects, and I also have three other projects to coordinate at the moment. As a result, my staff is getting unfocused, reviewing of the delivered products is getting late, and the moral is low.
I realised that I need to react, so I formally declared that the supplier must provide quality ensuranced products in a week, and they must not fail again. They replied that we are the folks who are incompetent, making too much assumptions, hints, constraints etc. and not even estimate the products in time.
At this level the conflict is seems unresolvable to me, so I am going to make a petition to our principal officer to make the rule. It will a painful step to all of us, but I can not see another way to regulate this hardly controlable and incooperative supplier. They want to invest the minimum efforts, getting the money as soon as possible, and they does not care about the project goals and the quality.
Could you provide any advice, please?
