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.
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