In today’s business environment, partnering makes the world go round. Whether you’re a small business having your payroll handled by an outside company or a large business with many partners, it just makes sense to let an expert deliver high performance in an area that is not your core competency. Sure, you can do it all, but you become masters of nothing. Your competitors will pass you by as they take the commuter lane, with multiple partners in their vehicle.

Let’s say that you’re convinced that partnering makes sense. What are the ground rules? What do you need to know?

Accenture recently published a paper entitled “Driving High-Performance Outsourcing: Best Practices from the Masters”. While outsourcing is the main focus of the paper, in reality its partnering that is the best practice. Let’s look at the Seven Best Practices:

1. Build in Broad Business Outcomes Early and Often: Incorporate business outcomes as a performance measure from the outset of the arrangement
2. Hire a Partner, Not Just a Provider: Look for a partner that brings a wide set of skills and strengths, and a long-term track record of delivering results, in addition to competitive pricing
3. It’s More Than a Contract, It’s a Business Relationship: Give as much attention to performance measurement and the quality of your relationship with your partner as you do to the contract.
4. Leverage Gain-Sharing: Use risk/reward provisions as incentives for higher-performance partnering.
5. Use Active Governance: Use active governance to manage the partner relationship for maximum performance
6. Assign a Dedicated Executive: Task your talented executives with the mission of optimizing your partner arrangements.
7. Focus Relentlessly on Primary Objectives: Be clear about objectives, cost, process improvements and the ability to focus on core business are the most common among partnering veterans.

Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? Well its simpler said than done. Each one of these practices is key to an effective partnering relationship. Remember why you are partnering and that you want someone to deliver better performance for less cost than you can deliver. By utilizing the seven best practices above, this can be achieved.

When partnering, it is important that you and your partner understand the business outcome which is to be achieved. Establishing business outcome metrics provides a valuable measuring stick of how well the partnership is performing. So what are business outcomes? Business outcomes are an observable result or change in business performance possibly supported by transaction-based metrics, resulting from an event or action like partnering. Many partnering arrangements feature service level agreements and operating level agreements that codify acceptable levels of performance. Most companies presume these minimum requirements will almost always be met. Business outcomes go beyond this point, defining more valuable business benefits to be gained from partnering. The survey results in the adjacent table identify the most common business outcome metrics utilized with partners.

Envision the power of having your partner focused on delivering the business objective versus just an operational activity. In this environment, they truly become a partner because they can see and contribute to your business objective. When this happens, they start to set strategies to help you achieve your business objective. This is much different than just planning to deliver an operational solution. This can enable your professional relationship to grow with your partners.

If you have partners today, ask yourself, “Are we measuring success using business outcomes?” If the answer is no, make it a priority to put these in place. If you are just beginning to partner, be sure that measuring business outcomes is part of the plan. There can be many challenges in partnering and many pitfalls can be avoided by having expert resources to deliver successful outcomes. The risks are worth taking because effective partnering can deliver the competitive advantage that differentiates your company in your marketplace.

contributed by Michael Vigil
Co-Author of Driving Complex Change

ASIL Receives Keeping America Strong Award

Heartbeat of America is a national television program created to help emerging companies grow. William Shatner and famous network news anchors will be presenting ASIL, Inc.'s story on national television on February 13, 2007 on the Americas Life Networ, and aired in major markets including New York, Boston, San Francisco, and San Jose. An impressive list of the program's supporters include Rear Admiral Kevin F. Delaney (ret.) who joined "Keeping America Strong" because of his belief that the program can help America move forward by helping worthy companies expand their business. In concert with Rear Admiral Delaney, news anchor Doug Liewelyn presented the "Keeping America Strong" award to ASIL,

Inc. acknowledging their 'Driving Complex Change' methodology and the pioneering efforts in helping companies increase their effectiveness in change management. President and CEO Peter Pazmany accepted the award on behalf of ASIL, Inc. If you would like to receive a copy of the interview, please email your contact information and request to: info@asil-inc.com

Spotlight: New Year Resolution

By now most of us have gotten through the initial excitement of the New Year and we are beginning to settle into the realities of our daily routines. Remember all of those heartfelt promises to improve this or change that, it almost feels like they were made long ago (deja vu). Not to worry. The excitement of the impact of change applies to your business life as well. Perhaps that fitness membership isn't in place yet, that shouldn't stop you from some of the heavy lifting that needs to be done at work. You know exactly what I am speaking about.

It is one of those untouched topics or forbidden areas where everyone knows that change must be made, yet everyone is waiting for someone else to notice and take control. Sometimes it looks like a process that doesn't always deliver satisfied results for customers, or it could be a new strategy or direction that people don't appear to be following, or perhaps even business activity that is not achieving profit.

There are many ways to initiate change and it starts with defining the need. The need becomes the basis for the value proposition in order to gain other's attention, support, approval, and commitment.

Try a leadership role and drive the changes that will improve your business. Take a look around you and see the many opportunities where an impact can be made by defining or enabling change. If you are not sure how to get started contact us for a preliminary consultation. Get involved and make a difference today.

contributed by Pete Pazmany

Industry Trends

Will Predictive Analytics Be the Next Breakthrough?

Optimize Business Relationships – Implement Contract Management Best Practices

According to the Institute for Supply Management, contracts are the foundation of the business world. Between 60% and 80% of all business-to-business transactions are governed by a formal trade agreement with the typical Fortune 1000 company maintains 20,000 to 40,000 active contracts at any given time. These agreements dictate the terms, pricing and service levels of a company’s customer, partner and supplier relationships.

Aberdeen Group’s assessment of contract management operations found that many businesses lack processes, systems, or corporate governance to effectively manage these contracts. This lack of clear contract management strategy can limit visibility into contract performance, expose companies to inflated costs, reduce leverage in negotiations, revenue opportunities missed, and poor compliance.

The following 10 factors were identified as key strategies for best practices in successful contract management:

1. Audit internal contract management processes, systems and controls before investing in a contract management solution.
2. Create a compelling business case with both benefit and crisis.
3. Ensure proper executive and stakeholder support for both contract management initiative and automation investment.
4. Define detailed functional requirements for a contract management solution – and stick to them.
5. Dedicate and empower a contract management program champion.
6. Establish a contract management governance council to ensure support from functional and business unit leaders.
7. Clearly define and communicate procedures and protocols for the complete contracting and contract administration process.
8. Use templates to streamline contracting cycles, minimize risk and maximize compliance.
9. Measure program performance and market results.
10. Identify areas for continuous improvement.

Reflecting on these concerns, monitoring progress was the primary area many executives could see for improvement. Only 56 percent of respondents say that their company currently tracks the execution of its strategic initiatives. Secondly, the need for integration between the company’s strategic planning group and its human resources group. Lastly, companies need to focus their strategic planning on new growth opportunities. 

To access the Aberdeen white paper, please click here.

contributed by Deborah LeBaker

Product Highlight

The MAX Partnering™ Corrective Action Resolution (CAR) tool includes functionality that businesses, organizations, and functional groups can leverage to correct and improve business controls. CARs can be automatically generated for overdue deliverables in the Integrated Project Manager, by out-of-limit scorecard performance, or can be created manually for Customer Complaints, Internal Audits, Continuous Improvements, and Escalations. The CAR tool is fully integrated with the Approved Parties List in order to facilitate the use of stored information to assign deliverable owners. CAR notifications and actions are automatically communicated throughout the resolution process with built in alerts and audit trails to track each step. Various history reports can be generated to evaluate CAR response times and closure rates to manage provider performance.

ASIL’s MAX Partnering™ Software application delivers this and much more.  For a full feature description of the MAX Partnering™ software application, click here.