How To Avoid Partner Conflicts

Balancing honest technical evaluation and partner loyalty is easy for management to talk about and hard for the front-line troops to do. These five tips tell how Primix keeps its focus on what's really important.

1. Maintain a results-based vision.
Primix's vision is made up of just four words: "Passion for business results." Everyone at the company knows the goal is to deliver business results to the client, and that guides our daily decision-making on all fronts, including the selection of corporate partners and technical architecture.

2. Formalize a partner selection process.
Start by identifying which categories of technology are strategic to the domains in which you deliver solutions. Enterprise application integration, for instance, is strategic to most SIS firms, as are certain wireless technologies, content-management tools, etc. Next, identify the dominant vendors in that space, with an eye toward developing relationships with the 20 percent of products that will cover 80 percent of clients' needs. The next gate must be a technology review and approval by the CTO's team. Then, and only then, should come the sales and marketing organization's review and approval.

3. Set appropriate expectations among partners.
Our experience has been that most technology vendors are good people who really believe in the ability of their technology to "win" when it should. Be up front about your approach and priorities, and about how an honest approach ultimately serves the interests of them, the client and you. Most will give you the same benefit of the doubt that you give them, and will recognize the value of having you really understand what their tools can do.

4. Practice "fast follower skill mix management."
Make sure you have the right tool for the job while maintaining the high utilization rates of a generalized technical consulting pool. You need a method of aligning the skill mix of that pool to close in on opportunities on an almost weekly basis. We started with a system of weekly sales opportunity forecasting, with an emphasis on identifying the required resource levels of specific skills. Now we're implementing a system to track the skill set of each consultant, sum up those to measure delivery capacity by skill, and provide "just-in-time training" to fill in the gaps.

5. Let front-line consultants feel the backing of senior management.
Even if you put all these strategies in place, lead architects and project managers need to know that the decisions they make will have the support of senior management if push comes to shove. The pressure to choose a good corporate partner can be intense in an individual bake-off, but the costs of putting a sales channel before the interests of a client are devastating to the big picture.