The Perspectives of Partnerships
There is a tremendous amount of bias in the purchasing process today. Often buyers will colour their criteria with their own experiences, goals and objectives.
Gartner recently issued an alarming statistic that almost 75% of all IT projects are considered failures by the business. This can be due to cost overruns, unmanaged or unmet expectations or simply not having the problem that is being solved clearly defined. Oscar Wilde has a famous quote “The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole” that summarizes the importance of perspective.
When selecting a new technology partner, it is key to not just focus on technical specs but also get a well-rounded worldview to help shape your buying criteria. Here are three perspectives that simply must be included before making any decisions.
Employees and Team: It’s amazing how often decisions are made without consulting the teams that use the technology and tools being implemented. Having the perspective of all users or prospective users of a service or platform is imperative to understanding how it will achieve the results you are striving for, truly defining the workflows and use cases that are causing friction currently, and also gaining valuable perspective and buy-in along the way. To be clear this doesn’t mean simply sending a survey, but rather having real conversations and understanding how your teams work, the problems they are facing and opportunities to collaborate to solve them.
Partners: Information no longer lives in silos. Including trusted business partners, suppliers and manufacturers can not only shed perspective from the broader industry but have materialized into interesting collaboration opportunities that might not have otherwise been uncovered. Whether it’s getting better turnaround times on products by tying pipeline forecasts together, speeding up deal approvals or having APIs on your partner roadmaps by having these conversations, the downstream benefits can leave a lot to the imagination. If the collaboration opportunity has enough business benefit for your partners, there may even be doors open for co-funding the initiative which you were looking to do anyway.*
Customers: Jeff Bezos famously leaves a chair empty in all meetings to make sure the ‘voice of the customer’ is represented. If Amazon’s success can show us anything, it’s that creating something irresistible to the customer is the key to long-term success. However, if you think about taking this one step further, imagine including your customers as part of the process of selecting new technology from the start. Having a voice of key and strategic customers will not only help to add a unique perspective but also will bring you closer as trusted allies through the process.*
*A quick note — when talking about investments and changes externally make sure to protect your interests through the appropriate paperwork such as a Non-Disclosure Agreement (or what your lawyers may advise). Although these may be great partnerships and customers ensuring that the confidentially of your investments, IP and business structures is still paramount.
It can seem like a daunting process to gather this much feedback before even embarking on the decision to select a new technology partner, but I guarantee you that gathering this additional perspective from all of these parties will save time, not increase the effort required (it just shifts it to the front!). If you can take this feedback and then use it to determine your buying criteria, your journey to select a new technology partner will be off to an incredible start with a clear framework for success.
