Aligning Your Goals

Last week, I caught wind of two separate industry developments that set me off on this topic.

Research released at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2003 found that approximately half of all IT projects will probably fail this year. The report also found that the blame falls on both outsourcers and their customers.

Consider that in 2003, fewer than one-third of companies that decide to offload their IT functions to an outside service provider actually will have a formal plan for guiding the process, and you'll have an inkling of why things are in such disarray.

Fact is, the customer has a responsibility to set goals and procedures for maintaining certain service levels. In their eagerness to sign contracts,any contracts,in the slow economy, outsourcing companies apparently have been willing to overlook this. Shame on them for not insisting on putting in place some mutually agreed upon goals and then regularly reviewing whether or not those goals need to be adjusted. CompuCom put such a model in place when it flipped into its services model, and every executive has a list of accounts to monitor.

This sort of alignment exercise doesn't happen often enough. When I consider ongoing points of conflict in the channel, invariably they surround areas in which there has been a breakdown in communication,or in which one party's strategy diverged from what it had been in the past but the party didn't bother to tell its partners why.

As CRN Distribution Editor Scott Campbell reports on page 5, imagine the dismay of the distributors participating in Hewlett-Packard's Integrated Partner program to find that the company may actually do away with the effort,after requiring them to invest millions in systems to help manage it in the first place. Where did the disconnect occur?

As a manager, one of the toughest things I do every January is write up performance appraisals. Frankly, I should probably do it once a quarter. That way, everyone would know what's expected,even if they don't like it. If perception is reality, clarity sure makes it a lot easier to function on a day-to-day basis.

HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, believes in keeping the lines of communication open. You can e-mail her at [email protected].