Working with partners to keep promises

There’s a lot of effort going into the practice of partnering- from market side partners like dealers and distributors to the supply side, like suppliers and advisors- even outsourced providers. Despite gains made in Supply Chain Management, Six Sigma and Strategic Account Management, there are huge opportunities for further gains from managing reliability at all levels.

Poor reliability in many interactions is unmeasured and therefore poorly managed. For example a study showed that only 14% of large software projects were completed as promised. Failure by partners to do what they say they will compromises productivity for both parties. Equally, organizations do a poor job of managing their partners for reliability and accepting their own behaviors can often make their partners unreliable.

There are four imperatives for working with partners to improve reliability. Here’s an example of the first imperative:

Know where poor reliability is occurring- most of the answers are waiting to be flushed out from staff. People at the interface with partners know what’s going right and what’s going wrong. It’s a matter of asking the right people the right questions.

An example is used which is worked from the recent HBR article on how differently Japanese automakers manage their partners compared to the Detroit “Big Three”- and achieve a huge reliability outcome.