My company, Allinnova, recently conducted a first of its kind survey among individuals who manage Alliances and Partnerships. Goal of these surveys is to determine which of those collaboration best practices appear essential to achieving long term success with this business strategy.
The question
“In the absence of formal standards for partnering, is there agreement on a set of practices that appears to make every company that deploys it, more successful in the long run?”
Can we, listening to those with 10+ years of pioneering experience, determine a set of practices that we can comfortably call GAPP? The report can be found on the Allinnova website at this location.
The first survey is now closed and the results are fascinating.
For this first study, the participation was moderate, as could be expected. General interest in the concept appeared quite high with over 230 individuals visiting the survey site to learn more about it. Allinnova promoted the project exclusively through its website, as well as selected social media sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.
Summary of Results
The survey respondents were overwhelmingly in a partner management role. Only a handful had never been in such a role or were no longer formally in such a role.
All respondents were focussed on strategic dimension practices. Practices in this category were more often voted “essential” or “very important” than practices in other categories. This is encouraging news, because it shows that the practitioners themselves at least maturing in their thinking and moving away from considering only opportunistic reasons for partnering.
Most practices considered relevant to build sustainable partnerships
Practices in the “Cultural” and “Governance” dimensions received very few to no scores in the “essential” and “very important” range, when calculated as a total respondent group. This is not encouraging, because research shows that those partnering activities that rely on people to make things work, are most often the reason for failure of the partnership.
Most valued practices
Strategy supporting practices preference
When looked at the responses per partnering dimension, practitioners and none-practitioners alike agreed on the importance of practices that support strategic initiatives.
This is all the more significant, because generally, alliance managers do complain about not getting the attention and recognition for contributions that they believe they are due. The question becomes: If they are correct about the importance of strategy-supporting partnering practices, how can they get the ear of C-level executives? For those that recognize this issue as one they are themselves struggling with, there is an interesting opportunity to discuss this with representatives from the Alliance Management community on September 9, 2010 in Chicago. Contact me for more information.
Finally, a ‘top 10′ list of those practices that were favored overall. No unanimous votes, but these were favored strongly enough to single them out.
We will be running this practitioner oriented survey again in the fall time frame. Look out for it, or, better yet, register to receive a notice when the survey is available. In the mean time, download the complete report at the Allinnova website
