Drawers, disclosure and Definitely Maybe
The case for partnership working
Imagine you’ve bought an Ikea chest of drawers. You’ve wrestled the flatpack into the car, out of the car and up the stairs. You’ve now got it in the right room and you can start to assemble it. Your esteemed life partner rocks up. But instead of rolling up sleeves and mucking in, that person simply leans against the doorframe, musing about whether you should have bought one quite that big, giving you ill-informed instructions and criticising how you’re doing with the Allen key.
That is precisely the relationship between many IT clients and their suppliers. The heavy lifting and mistake-making is done by the supplier, with the client looking on critically. Neither party enjoys it. The result is rarely quite what either side was looking for. There’s no joint enterprise, just a master-slave contract.
We need to stop working like this in IT, I think. In the last few years, I’ve found that a programme goes so much further so much faster if the whole team genuinely embraces partnership working. That means pooling ideas, knowledge and IP. This can be a little awkward at first, if you’re coming from the master-slave model. Clients worry about all kinds of things, from where accountability lies; to loss of their IP to competitors; to loss of staff to their suppliers. But I strongly believe that any programme will blossom if everyone signs-up to a few simple rules:
1. Be clear about the client
The first step is for all parties to ditch the concept that the purchasing CIO/CTO is the client. I’m not talking about project oversight or accountability (I’m coming on to that), but about the role within the psychological relationship between vendor and buyer.
Everyone involved needs to ask: “who’s really the customer?” With new IT, that question can be quite complicated to answer. It might be the end-users within the buyer-organisation. But it might even/also be the client’s clients. Or both.
What it isn’t, in almost all cases, is the CIO/CTO or the buyer-organisation’s IT team. Buyers and vendors who focus on the benefits of their product for the IT people, without regard for down-the-line users, are missing the point.
Vendors: chumming up with the Client IT team has its merits – it will mean you can all work together smoothly. But to get a second sale down the line, your solution has to be focused primarily on the real client, the end-user. So be a valuable part of the full transformation team and listen to their feedback, preferably face-to-face, without a lost-in-translation interpreter. Get an insight into the widest aims of the project. You need to understand what type of business improvement the client is striving for; and what the goals of the full transformation team are.
2. It’s ours, not mine
This also applies to both parties. The vendor may bring a unique widget or process; but it will doubtlessly be more effective if the client is allowed to adapt it slightly to suit the precise needs of end-users. Don’t be precious; think of it as someone helping you with your long-term product development.
This idea broadens out to all the IP involved in the programme. Vendors who are new to collaborative partnership will often still be shaking off the old paradigm of Never Give Anything Away. So they operate only one half of partnership working – the bit where they harvest the client’s ideas. They squirrel these away for use with their next client, but they give nothing back in exchange.
When the buyer spots this is happening, he immediately hugs his IP very close to his chest. Now neither of us are giving anything away. No partnership is occurring. The solution is not blossoming.
I’d say to both sides: just give it a go! Give a little nugget away! You’ll be amazed what the other side might add to it, making it a much chunkier nugget. Both parties are growing their IP; and the buyer-organisation is, by definition, growing theirs ahead of the rest of their sector.
3. It’s us, not them
Both the above points have led me to conclude that it‘s almost impossible for most parts of a programme to be successfully developed in a hand-me-down format. The client-team acting as intermediaries between the wider transformation team and the suppliers guarantees loss of relevance, content, ownership and innovative thinking.
Instead, I firmly believe that hybrid teams combining client and vendor members will always work best. Decision-making will be improved by having a wider breadth of knowledge and experience and differing perspectives. Contextual understanding will be improved by having insiders present, avoiding unworkable flights of fancy. And the combined ideas will always be bigger than the ideas each side would have had on its own.
Working collaboratively like this reduces the tendency towards blame in favour of shared goals and joint responsibility. More focus is placed on getting it right rather than in holding forensic investigations into who got it wrong.
4. Warts and all disclosure
When leading a programme, I don’t EVER want to be simply told that everything’s fine. I want to be told precisely how it’s fine, or less than fine, or a that it’s a rare old catastrophe. And yet vendors who are not working in true partnership will often persist with the old-school assumption that it’s essential to appear swan-like, cool and unruffled by anything the buyer raises. The vendor will give a firm one-sentence reassurance that what is being requested can be done/is in hand/has been fixed; and then not elaborate further.
Trouble, is, no-one is reassured by an unsubstantiated reassurance. It is assumed that no swan-like behaviour is occurring back at Vendor HQ – more likely, it’s headless-chicken-central. The customer does not need reassurance: he/she needs transparency. In true partnership working the problem is defined and shared. Indeed, we might all be part of the solution.
Vendors: don’t tell us it’s all OK! Be honest, tell us there are problems – alongside telling us what you’re doing to fix them. We’ll help too. Silence is not golden; it’s suspicious.
5. Governance, governance, governance
Partnership working is often taken to mean there will be the muddiest of waters if something goes wrong. Buyer-organisations tend to think it’s best that everyone has a distinct place in the pecking order so that someone can be taken out and shot if needed.
I’d argue that:
a)First off, partnership working reduces the need for firing squads, because there are fewer unsolved problems . Partners first disclose and then fix problems, rather than these becoming nasty surprises uncovered at crisis point.
b)There needs never be any fudge over who’s responsible for what. Responsibilities and obligations can be agreed ahead in a businesslike manner. I once drew up a partner’s responsibilities for an extremely complicated transformation on 1.5 sides of A4. You can also cover any worries about IP dissemination here, but bear in mind you’ll be first-to-market with anything you jointly invent, which is what really matters.
c)The secret is to keep a tight rein on checking that we’re all delivering against the expectation. So a weekly governance meeting that objectively holds to account all parties on progress against their obligations is essential. Putting governance in the hands of a programme sponsor who isn’t a deliverer is key.
Recently, I shared these revelations with a marketing colleague of mine. She gave me an odd look – the kind you use when your 15-year-old says you might like a little-known band he’s discovered on Spottify called Oasis. “That takes me back,” she said. “I remember when this partnership concept first dawned on us in Marketing. Some new band was very big at the time, with an album called Definitely Maybe …”
