Strategies for Sharing Work with Agency Partners
When you choose to partner with a third party to get work done, you’ll have to think about how to carve up the work for best effect. There is no perfect way. It all depends on the skills and strengths on your team, your partner’s skill set and of course timing.
But there are some heuristics to look at and take guidance from, and today's your lucky day, because I am going to share them to you.
The frame for this thinking come from Wardley Mapping. It’s a good concept and there is plenty of broader use for this model. If you want to go deep, read more here.
A super brief intro to Wardley mapping
Things move from novel to commodity over time.
When things are very novel, you have to invent them, which is a mysterious and often chaotic search for a solution. Over time, things get productized and eventually commodified.
As things drift to commodity, your expectations and experienced shift from dealing with uncertainty to fairly straight line cost/benefit analysis. Similarly, as you shift towards commodity, your solutions shift from being invented towards being rented.
Focus on what makes your beer taste better
When we think about how to share work with partners, we can ask ourselves what matters to your business and your customers, and that helps us think about what to share out and to whom.
This table shows things to consider across three assessment criteria and proposes a grading scale of the degree to which you work with partners. The three criteria are;
- The economic stage of the capability; from novel to commodity
- Tolerance for risk and uncertainty
- The degree that IP is closely held and unique to the organisation
These are the most common ones I hear people expressing, although you might see additional aspects that can be measured as well.
Where your work sits on these three dimensions has implications for how you choose to partner.
Are the jobs that need doing on the right of this model and in the commodity space? If so then your solution should be to rent services — the classic example being your cloud provider, monitoring services identity tools and so on.
You should be looking to who can do it cheapest, and your analysis should take into consideration not just the sticker price, but also the opportunity costs. Should your team be managing infrastructure or building vanilla tools that the industry has already invested? Nope. Spend your time on higher value work.
If your job to be done is on the left of this diagram, the work is more about investing things. In this case, ask yourself ‘Do we have what it takes to invent the thing’ which includes not just creative talent, but also tolerance for failure and uncertainty.
If you aren't willing to walk into the unknown with a hope and a prayer, then perhaps you can summon an expert to come and help you. In this case; finding a master brewer will help you discover that beautifully flavoured beverage you are searching for faster, cheaper and with much less stress.
Of course, you can never go completely hands off.
You can’t delegate a service to a utility without someone watching SLAs and managing contracts. Nor can you delegate inventing a new product to a third party — how would you ingest the product into your organisation, understand it and evolve it? No, there needs to be some degree of partnership at all points on this spectrum.
The nature and degree of engagement will shape the way you partner, and who you partner with.
On the partner side it will be Niche specialists for inventions, and low cost, but reliable payers for the commodity side. And useful tradespeople who are good at their job in the middle. And if they have broader skills; that’s a bonus to be explored and exploited.
On your side of the relationship, there are different people as well. On the novel end, the work is co-creation, so send in your explorers and inventors. On the commodity end, it’s value management via contracts, s send in your administrators and optimizers.
I do hope this explanation was useful. I’m always up for discussing these ideas. If you’d like to discuss more, feel free to get in touch.
