Do not be an opportunity junkie and spread yourself too thin. Develop core opportunities and then execute them with precision. One of the most fruitful opportunity areas are with clients with common issues with which only one of the partners is currently engaged.
4. Mitigate Risk Factors
Conduct appropriate due diligence and get client testimonials and references from your new strategic partner. Make sure that they can deliver what they are promising. Start off slowly with new strategic partners, and the trust will build with each successful project you complete together. Other ways to mitigate risk factors are:
• Have clear and ongoing project communications.
• Properly evaluate and manage client expectations.
• Establish timelines that work to your client’s benefit.
• Set performance expectations for your partner.
• Manage your customer relationships.
• Project manage the process.
• Manage your strategic partner ’s progress and service offerings.
• Always communicate directly with your client.
5. Measure and Monitor Performance
Always be in close communication with your client and partner project teams, and manage the project and the new services to the best of your abilities. Do not take your eye off the ball. Choosing a great strategic partner does not mean that you should not monitor their performance. A key challenge to managing partners is the ability to properly project manage the process and your customer ’s expectations. Your strategic partner offers services that your client needs, but the firm should not assume that they will be delivered in a timely manner or at the level of excellence that is expected.
Set performance expectations for your strategic partners and evaluate their performance over time. Always make sure your client’s needs are met to your clients satisfaction, as well as your own. Make adjustments when necessary. Set service level expectations for your partners, and evaluate those services in light of your partner ’s performance on projects.
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The Front Office: Driving Sales and Growth
6. Reevaluate and Deploy Short- and Long-Term
Goals and Continuously Improve Processes
Develop short- and long-term goals and routinely reevaluate your progress.
Are your goals being met, and is this the right partner for you? Do not be afraid to speak up. If things are not working to your expectations, communicate your concerns clearly with your partner and make appropriate changes as soon as possible. Good communication between partners will help to nurture a win-win relationship and lead to service offerings of which you both will be proud.
Continuously improve how you work with your strategic partners
through planning sessions after each project is completed successfully. Find new ways to improve services that will successfully meet or exceed client expectations.
Success will be determined by both parties putting in time, energy, and resources. In evaluating short- and long-term goals, a strong commitment to your partner will result in great services and satisfied clients.
Summary
Select strategic partners carefully and decide where they provide the most value and where they will fill voids in your firm’s current service offerings.
Think of partners as specialized business units that provide select services.
Involve your management team in developing a plan, and then implement that plan with energy, time, and capital. Look for partners with customers, culture and services that are congruent with your own.
Develop solid contracts with your partners so that there will be minimal opportunities for misunderstandings and common knowledge of the partnership’s goals. Develop a business plan with the partner so that both parties understand the revenue milestones and expectations and are vested in executing the plan. Find areas where you and your partner complement each other and create broader service lines to offer to clients. Set performance expectations for your strategic partners and evaluate their performance over time.
Good partnerships will provide a clear and measurable financial return to both parties. Make sure the partnership meets rate and cash f low needs. If the marriage between you and your partner is not working, cut your losses and look for new partners. Trust, complementary services, and team players are the foundation of a successful partnership. Like Microsoft and IBM, a great partnership can build a company overnight. Determining areas for partnerships, selecting partners, and actively managing them is critical for today’s professional services firm.
Strategic Partnering
193
RESOURCES
Strategic-alliances.orgAlliancedworld.com
John R. Harbison and Peter Pekar, Smart Alliances: A Practical Guide to Repeatable Success (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998).
Mitchell Lee Marks and Philip H. Marvis, Joining Forces: Making One Plus One Equals Three in Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999).
Patricia Ward Biederman and Warren G. Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration (Oxford England: Perseus Press, 1998).
James E. Austin and Frances Hesselbein, Collaboration Challenge (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000).
James F. Moore, The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems (New York: Harperbusiness, 1997).
Harvard Business Review on Strategic Alliances (Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
Larraine D. Segil, Intelligent Business Alliances: How to Profit Using Today’s Most Important Strategic Tool (New York: Times Books, 1996).
Stephen M. Dent, Partnering Intelligence: Creating Value for Your Business by Building Strong Alliances (Palo Alto, CA: Davies-Black Publishing, 1999).
Juli Betwee, William Berquist, and David Meuel, Building Strategic Relationships: How to Extend Your Organization’s Reach Through Partnerships, Alliances, and Joint Ventures (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1995).
John K. Conlon and Melissa Giovagnoli, The Power of Two: How Companies of All Sizes Can Build Alliance Networks That Generate Business Opportunities (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998).
Smart Alliance Partners website, a top destination for information on strategic alliances found at http://www.smartalliancepartners.com.
The Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals—a membership organization dedicated to the topic of strategic alliances—online at http://www
.strategic-alliances.org.
NOTES
1. Widely attributed to Thomas A. Edison from a variety of sources including www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ quotes/t /thomasaed131432.html.
2. Dr. Judith Kautz, Small Business Notes at http://www.smallbusinessnotes.com
/operating/leadership/strategicalliances.html.
3. Todd Jatras, Forbes Magazine, “Can India Retain Its Reign as Outsourcing King?” (February 28, 2001).
SECTION III
The Organization:
Attracting and Retaining
the Best Professionals
9
Organization Structure
FRANK RIBEIRO
Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.
—Philip Crosby1
The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up.
—Harold R. McAlindon2
This chapter identifies and defines the primary ways in which professional services firms are organized and discusses how different types of organizational models can enhance or impede the success of the firm. Because the most important asset of any professional services firm is its employees, it is critical that its organizational design allow people the freedom to operate effectively while supplying needed structure as well as checks and balances to keep the firm on track. This balance can be difficult to achieve.
Most professional services firms are made up of talented and intelligent people who are eager to develop new ideas and methodologies and have little patience for complex organizational structures that hamper their creativity.
Yet, for a firm to be successful as a business, it must have a mechanism that forges the talent and intelligence of its professional staff into a cohesive whole. The organizational model must create and reinforce the alignment between the company’s external and internal strategies, support the firm’s chosen image and branding strategy, and be f lexible enough to respond quickly to changes in the business environment.
197
198
Attracting and Retaining the Best Professionals
Why This Topic Is Important
Employees are a professional firm’s most important asset. The firm’s product is intangible. When clients buy professional services, they are, in essence, buying a firm’s people. Thus, a firm’s reputation and success depend exclusively on the talent and intelligence of the people delivering it. To prosper, firms must hire the best people, develop them, motivate them, and build in career paths that keep them committed to the firm. Yet, the very people who make a professional services firm stand out can be those who are most difficult to manage. Regardless of specific industry, employees at successful professional services firms have the same general set of personality characteristics. They are energetic, strong-willed, opinionated, confident, and always in pursuit of new challenges. They work best in a dynamic environment that allows them the freedom to do what they do best.
Like any other business, however, a professional services firm needs to have adequate structure to coordinate everyone’s efforts and offer one face to clients. The question top management must constantly grapple with is how to put in place an organizational structure that gives employees the freedom to operate creatively within the context of a stable, functional firm. How can the firm rein in employees appropriately without establishing so much bureaucracy that they no longer feel they have any choices? For an organizational structure to work under these conditions, it must balance the need for clear definition and explicit coordination of roles and responsibilities with the need to preserve enough autonomy to engender creative, cross-functional decision making and problem solving.