Part of the reason the partnership worked for us is our quality of communication and how we went about managing the expectations.
Here is our secret sauce for successful partnering:
Confidentiality & Trust
Like any partner expects, the confidentiality of what has been discussed and shared should not be thrown out in the open, not even discussed among friends.
Part of this practice has led to us being questioned about never disclosing a logo of a client, for whom we had done the work but via partners.
We fully respect and recognize the partner business and the efforts they had put in acquiring the client.
Can you imagine what would happen if you were to talk to someone about your spouse’s friend and that very act of breaking the confidentiality is exposed?
Paying attention to what is being told
Some relations are taken for granted, some projects are seen as the repeat of the past few and some works are delayed for apparently no reason and the outcome is a question what happened our partnership? Much like what happened to the romance we had before marriage.
All that one needs to do is treat the project needs of a partner with as much attention and detail as one can and make it essential for the other partner to having to repeat the same.
One simple, yet effective move is to ensure a log is maintained under all circumstances, your project partnership will work.
Act on the information & Go Beyond if you can!
Business cannot afford to do out of scope works, but if you are able to understand what is needed, anticipate and plan it well, yes, you can neutralize the business troubles of delivering as per the expectation.
Going beyond is not doing more work than what was expected, but being through on what was told and executed with a quality that cements the perfection of work.
It is no different from being on the airport to receive your spouse with a small gift, that adds a bit of flavor to meeting with expectations.
What you could have given might be small, but that small step provides an extra comfort.
Staying Committed
Naturally, working with multiple partner is not an issue as long as working with competing partners becomes a scenario. We often check on cases where in we find possibilities of having to deal with a conflict of interest scenario.
No business regulates itself in the manner we can expect it to, often times you are faced with issues that come from the past.
For instance, it’s like meeting your ex at a place where you used to frequent, only that you are meeting them with your current partner.
It should have been easy to avoid, it should be easy to manage; but there are enough if’s and but’s in this that you better be wary about such problems happening.
Conflict of interest is a very similar game.
If both of your partners have the same end customer and are looking for same or similar service, solution, its best that you manage the conflict, avoid losing both partners; rather stay committed to your business!
Staying Long term & Looking beyond the attractions
Partnerships gradually mature, some leave & some grow. The outcome cannot be controlled. This is all business driven.
Business on their own go through cycles of iterations. Businesses have a poignant need to make the business run like machinery.
But even well established businesses and promising products become obsolete.
Look at what happened to the Walkman Music Players; iPOD’s made them irrelevant.
From advanced skill demands, the technology matures to make such advanced skills irrelevant.
Today, there are do it yourself programming interfaces that work without any need to learn coding.
So, migration towards a particular point of maturity and change is an absolute certainty.
If you have been working with a partner for long term, suddenly your partner decides that migrating to a whole different level is needed, then, it becomes a necessity.
The choices you make and the innovation you bring onboard help you survive the partnership and matures the relations.
We have had effective IT partnerships in last several years; we have worked on projects of all sizes and we can go beyond the usual captives.
We can always make the business grow through joint efforts, that is what is partnership all about.
Contact Us for discovering what we can offer for our partners. We do a lot of things, from media related works to basic ecommerce or content management works to complex enterprise scale product development jobs.
Original Source – 5 ways of ensuring successful partnership in IT Business
