If you're coming from engineering like I was, Third-Party Risk Management feels weirdly... analog at first. No version control, no CI/CD pipelines, no unit tests for vendor compliance. Just spreadsheets, PDFs, and hope.
But here's the thing: after debugging race conditions and production outages, vendor management starts looking familiar. You're dealing with dependencies again—just ones that come with legal contracts instead of package.json files.
The TPRM Workflow (Programmer Edition)
Phase 1: Dependency Scanning = Discovery
In code, npm audit finds vulnerable packages. In enterprises? Procurement databases plus IT asset inventories.
