Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) questionnaires tend to suck. The one commonality that tends to bind them all is none of them map to anything that makes it easier to answer. While we cannot make TRPM easy, we can make it structured.
The Secure Controls Framework has a TPRM fix worth paying attention to: already included in the control set (currently around 1,500 controls, mapped to 200+ laws, regulations, and frameworks) is a question-format for each control - the control statement becomes the question. Answer once against the control, and you've effectively answered the NIST 800-53 version, the ISO 27001 version, and the PCI DSS version of that same ask, because the mapping already did that work.
At the end of the day, someone still has to judge whether the vendor's answer is credible or just well-formatted. No framework fixes a vendor who lies on a questionnaire, and no amount of control mapping replaces an analyst who actually reads the answer.
If your TPRM program is still built on a homemade spreadsheet with no mapping to anything, standardizing the questions yourself is the cheapest improvement available to you. It is worth building your next questionnaire around control language instead of starting from scratch.
You can download the SCF for free from: https://securecontrolsframework.com/free-content
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