Strategic Alliance professionals know that following a sound partnering process greatly improves their alliance results. In fact, using a partnering process is one of the top three drivers of alliance success. This shouldn’t be surprising since process fidelity, or doing what has been proven to work, positively impacts most human endeavors. Process is how average people achieve above average success. Put more simply; if you want to bake good cookies, follow a good recipe!

So why do so few companies and alliance managers actually use a partnering or alliance process in their work? It takes more effort to invent a new approach or build an alliance tool from scratch. Setting expectations and keeping promises becomes expensive and unlikely when a consistent approach is not in place with every alliance. Measuring and managing progress and results takes much greater effort when every alliance is a one-off. The reasons for using a partnering process should seem compelling to any manager.

On reflection, the barriers to more consistent partnering process use are surprisingly many. There are several decent or better alliance processes out there. We at ProPartnering think we use a particularly complete and proven approach, but many other similar partnering processes can and do work when followed. But, many alliance organization leaders do not have alliance process experience or best practices education or training. Alliance managers and leaders often come from other disciplines and bring practices and processes from sales, product management or project management. They try to adapt tools and processes they already know to the alliance setting with mixed results, particularly when each person on the team uses a different approach. An insightful coaching colleague suggests that creative alliance people get bored with using the same tools and steps every time. We get that adrenalin rush from the challenge of doing it differently every time. That may be closer to the mark than we want to admit.

Most people today, including many business people, hate the word “process”. They view it as old fashioned. Process stifles creativity. It evokes images of manuals and flow charts. To borrow a concept from Garrison Keillor, “we are all above average”, so we don’t need to use a consistent process to achieve above average results. Just the word itself—the “p-word” brings out similar reactions from business people as “He who must not be named” does for J. K. Rowling’s characters in Harry Potter. Given the inherent value in taking advantage of previous learning and experience, how can we get past this aversion to following a process?

Assuming we have to perfectly and blindly execute every process step keeps us from seeing or realizing the good value in using a proven partnering process. Process engineers define process as doing every task the same way every time. That cannot be our aim with the alliance process. People are not widgets. When we deal with people issues and collaboration among different groups, the alliance or partnering process itself should provide a good guide, but the almost infinite variation in people and organizations gives plenty of scope for the creative alliance manager to adjust and adapt their basic process approach to meet the specific needs of the situation. The advantage of a proven alliance or partnering process is that when you deviate from the process, you know what you skipped or changed—and what the consequences might be and how to mitigate any resulting risks. To reprise our cooking metaphor, if you have a good recipe for beef stew and a good idea of how and why the recipe works, you can adapt your baking to the ingredients and equipment you have. Missing the turnips, you might substitute carrots. No time to marinate the meat overnight, you can tenderize the beef and extend the cooking time a bit. Adding creativity to a proven recipe makes for blue ribbon cooking!

Managing alliances by creatively following a proven process will generate blue ribbon results in your alliance work too. First, have in place and really understand your organization’s alliance process. Make sure it’s complete from the first step of defining your partnering needs, desired partner roles and profile to managing the alliance lifecycle. Then, be realistic about where the alliance is today. You don’t have to restart from scratch. You may want to reverse engineer a few steps to fix things that aren’t going well or to shore up a missing relationship. Constantly adapt your process implementation to the realities and needs of your alliance. If a process step doesn’t fit your alliance’s situation, do what is needed. Just be sure to keep your alliance process in sight, so you don’t wander completely away from proven best practices. Be creative from your proven process base. And remember, if in doubt, follow your process.

Gerry Dehkes
October 9, 2008