Assessing the Alliance Performance

You have established an Alliance some time ago. Now you are wondering if your Alliance is performing to the goals and objectives formulated at the beginning. This issue remains one of the big difficulties for most companies.

Many companies forget to apply standard organization processes to the topic of Alliances. Companies must adjust their internal mindset and organization in several ways to accommodate the twin needs of the Alliance:

• Continuous growth toward a healthy and well oiled Alliance creating value for all partners involved.
• Periodic feedback to stakeholders on the success of your partnering efforts and the validity to continue in the chosen direction.

Issues

• You entered into the Alliance relationship without having clearly formulated quantifiable objectives
• You know about the need for benchmarks and measurement at regular intervals, but find it hard to formulate relevant, measurable goals.
• Your Alliance partner is not able to provide you with the kind of (detail) data you need to perform your own independent evaluation
• You don't have the internal capacity (systems, process, infrastructure, skills) to perform the performance assessment that you know is needed.

If this applies to you and your company, here are some things to consider:

Opportunities

• A natural event to improve the quality of your overall performance assessment processes
• A reason to communicate with your Alliance partner, building trust and goodwill by showing your willingness to openly discuss a sensitive topic.
• A natural event to discuss the overall health of the Alliance with your partner(s).
• A feedback opportunity for management to improve ability to formulation realistic goals supporting the decisions made during the strategic planning process.

Risks

• Showing your Alliance partner weakness; You have no good way to determine the (value of) other party's contribution to the Alliance.
• Reviewing and recovering from earlier mistakes could get you bogged down without getting the infromation you require to move forward.
• You may find out that the Alliance is having a negative impact on your company's health

Our Recommended Approach

• Review your original Alliances objectives and extrapolate metrics from these
• Review your Alliance contract and extrapolate metrics
• Obtain results from various relevant departments: Sales, Marketing, PR, Customer Service, Tech Support
• Compare results against planned and evaluate options
• Address the results with your Alliance counterparts, NO MATTER WHAT THE RESULTS!