To succeed with the partner selection, the procurement process should include good competences from business, IT and procurement. There are different aspects to agree with: quality of partnership is important but so is the cost of those services and the ease of working together. How to align those targets for the best outcome?
To help you with this task, here are suggestions on how to support the best possible procurement outcome:
1. Ask how the partner demonstrates quick time to value
Does a partner prefer automation over manual work? Do they encourage using automation tools and practices? What’s their viewpoint on removing manual tasks and team size? Are they interested in your full business process in which they would be a part of? Does the partner use DevOps as a delivery model?
These are examples of questions you can ask for understanding how to be efficient with the time to value. By quick time to value, the partner can solve your IT issues in a productive manner and improve the total value of your IT investment.
2. Ensure your company’s governance and ways of working are supporting the IT operations model
To build trust, it’s good to have clearly defined targets for the collaboration, clarified responsibilities and set expectations for both you and the partner. These targets will help you create governance that you can follow to ensure that the partner is doing their part to collaborate as expected, and the partner understands what’s expected from them.
During a procurement process, provide your models and ways of working to the partner candidates to help them understand what you’re expecting from the collaboration, and ask how they would align themselves to support them. If you’re embarking on a transformation journey, understanding the as-is situations helps these partners to set their minds on the improvement roadmap and provide those ideas as a part of their proposal.
3. Ask your own employees what’s currently working (and what’s not)
Are you sure you know how much time your employees spend to keep the current service delivery going? Ask your people and understand how much time they spend handling with the current partner. It’s possible for service delivery to work on paper, but it’s heavily supported by your own people doing extra work. A non-working partnership increases the total cost of ownership – even though it’s not directly visible on the balance sheet.
Why not start early and measure these efforts for a few months before you start the procurement journey? At best, this gives you a better understanding of the total cost of the current service and highlights what kind of service you have – and whether your employees are happy with the current service delivery.
4. Get to know the people you would be working with
IT services are people business. Even though there are technology, systems and operation models, it’s people helping people. Require a team interview from a partner and ask them to demonstrate both their technical skills, problem-solving skills and culture fit to your company.
Additionally, ask about their experience with similar customer cases, technologies and how did they succeed. References provide guardrails that a partner knows what they’re doing and that they have existing models for good collaboration.
5. Be smart about price and quality criteria
Along with price, ensure that quality is well-weighed in the selection. As mentioned in the previous points, good quality criteria are e.g., technical competencies, ease of collaboration, references of similar work done and partner’s customer satisfaction. Align your service metrics and KPIs to the procurement and try to get a full picture of what the service looks like with each partner candidate.
As trust is an important factor in working relationships, how much do you trust each candidate? Can you trust them to do their best – or do you feel the need to manage them a lot for the sake of your own business?
6. Create the contract together
When searching for a true partnership, you can down-select to 2-4 partners and write the contract together. This gives you time to deep dive into collaborative models and ensure that the everyday life with the selected partner goes smoothly. Also, you can benefit from their experience as this is their core business.
Make sure the partner understands the service metrics: what the business impact is, what it means in practice, and what’s unique to your business.
We work with a wide range of business domains and customers, and we’ve done so throughout our history. We work daily with procurement teams, business owners and IT stakeholders. We would love to help your procurement be successful and achieve your business goals. Let’s stay in touch.