Building Successful Partnerships with Technology Vendors: Insights from Experience
25 Years of Insights: Keys to Successful Tech Partnerships
Over the past 25 years, as a second-generation IT professional, I have had the privilege of consulting for and delivering technology solutions to many hundreds of companies—ranging from small startups to large global enterprises and household names. My journey has been both broad and deep, working as a vendor, a consultant, an integrator, and as a hands-on technical lead. Most of the time, I was not only leading the technical aspects but also defining and scoping the projects. I have always been one to take responsibility, so the success of the given project has often been on my shoulders.
Through these experiences, I have developed methodologies and principles that set up technology projects for success. I have also honed a keen eye and a good nose for recognising situations, scenarios, organisations, and teams where success is unlikely, allowing me to navigate away from potential failures, and course correct back to a successful delivery.
In this article, I want to share some of that experience, particularly in the scope of collaborating with vendors. I have observed certain characteristics from providers that are unlikely to result in successful outcomes, and I will touch on those here.
Our objective is to deliver successful technology projects, which boils down to understanding what success looks like. What does progress in the business look like? What value does the business seek and need? How do we reliably deliver that in a measurable way without redefining what success looks like at the end of the project (which is a common failure), but defining it at the beginning and tracking it through so the project delivers true promised value?
Over the course of my career, I have found organisations and vendors struggling increasingly with this. Failed technology projects are becoming increasingly normalised, and I have often found myself stepping in to fix disasters. I want to share my experiences regarding vendors to ensure that does not happen to you.
In the world of business, particularly when dealing with technology vendors, building successful partnerships is crucial for achieving optimal outcomes. Coming from someone who is now a full-time vendor but has spent many years working with vendors and customers to get business results, I would like to share some of my experiences on what makes these relationships successful—and what can make them unsuccessful.
The Role of the Trusted Advisor
Primarily, the most important role of a vendor is to be a trusted advisor. Vendors typically specialize in specific areas—they are experts in identity management, cybersecurity, development, infrastructure, voice systems, and so on. Their teams are comprised of professionals ranging from account managers and salespeople to engineers, support staff, architects, and various consulting roles. Internally, they have a skill hierarchy and matrix that allows them to offer a series of specialized services repeatably.
In every interaction, vendors should be adding value—that is why you have them there. Think of it like this: focus on what you are really strong at in your business. If you make dentistry equipment, drive as many of your resources as possible toward making the best dentistry equipment for your market. Then, find the most cost-effective way to manage non-core activities like managing your employee devices. Outsource roles that can be effectively managed by specialists so that it does not take time away from your people or distract your business.
This is a big topic, but from my experience my general advice for customers is keep core products and technologies internal, especially when it is valuable Intellectual Property, and outsource generic technology requirements, like employee device management. There is no value in you becoming an expert in device management, my friends and I at Devicie have built a hyper scalable, globally available, world leading solution to which you can simply subscribe. We have put decades of expertise and wisdom to achieve security or operation outcomes you could never achieve alone. Rather, there is great deal to be lost by outsourcing your core business and it is generally not advisable. You must stay the expert of your own product, and work with partners who are the experts of theirs for you to enjoy ideal outcomes.
Leveraging Vendor Expertise
These specialists have made a lot of mistakes, so you do not have to make them. You are learning from their trial, error, and continuous improvement. They meet requirements you do not even know you need to meet—for example, compliance or legal requirements around privacy. They reduce and manage the risks that newly adopted technologies introduce to your business, ensuring that you’re not distracted by a cybersecurity outage or a system failure.
Measuring Success by Business Outcomes
It is a partnership, and you measure its success by the business outcomes. If it is not giving you more time to focus on your core business, if it is not giving your people more headspace to focus on your core products and services, then it is not worth it. It is not adding value.
The Importance of Commitment and Adoption
One crucial aspect I would like to emphasize is the need for full commitment to the process and outcomes when collaborating with a vendor. If you are bringing in a partner to create new capabilities, you must resource them effectively and give them the time to succeed. This means allocating the necessary personnel, time, and attention to the project.
You need to allow your business the time and space to grow and learn from the engagement. If, when the project closes or the engagement ends, you have done nothing to adopt it into your business, you are setting everyone up to fail. The partner succeeds when you adopt the capability 100%.
For example, at Devicie—my company—we collaborate very closely with our customers to ensure that when they sign up, Devicie manages every single one of their devices. We do not want any gaps; we do not want 90%, 95%, or even 99% managed. We want 100% of them managed by Devicie. The reason is that if it is 100%, they get 100% value out of the service we offer. There is no 1% of the business that suffers or does not have the capability; everybody gets the full benefit.
We need customers that are willing to change and go with us along the journey for that to be possible. If it takes a customer six months to roll it out because other priorities come up, that’s six months where they have had reduced value. Even if Devicie is there with all the capabilities ready for them, they need to start walking to reap the benefits.
The Pitfalls of Focusing Solely on Cost
Sometimes, businesses have an attitude where they think their primary job is just to get the service from their vendors as cheap as possible. They haggle and wrestle with the vendor to exhaustion. I have even seen organisational cultures where they boast about how much money they have been able to save, saying things like they “bent over the vendor again.” This macho behaviour can be detrimental.
Your partnership is only valuable if you are making your vendors succeed. Skinning them just makes it harder for them to cooperate, harder for them to do R&D, and harder for them to survive downturns in the economy. We want to make sure our partners thrive as well, so they can continue to improve their offerings, attract the best talent, and bring the best skills into your organization. The stronger our partners are, the stronger we are.
Creating Mutually Beneficial Relationships
Have you ever thought about giving a bonus to your partners or vendors? Have you ever thought about giving them equity in your business so that they win if you win? Have we really thought about what the best outcome we can achieve together is and focused on that? Of course, we need to make sure it pays for itself—the value must be there—but the point is that we need to make sure our partners are equipped to deliver the best possible service.
Effective Project Scoping and Pricing
When it comes to partnerships with vendors, even from the commercial aspects of the relationship, the vendor needs to be more skilled and experienced at being able to cost and price the projects or the partnership. They should be able to explain and include gotchas and areas that the client might not know about.
For example, in technology projects—which is my specialty—the sizing of services is critical. When I was a junior, my mentors would always require me to do calculations to anticipate the load that the systems I would deliver would need to manage, so they could give value for three, five, or more years. It was not worth just thinking about the resources they needed right now; it was about recommending systems that might be a bit more expensive than expected but would not be problematic in the short term.
The Case Against Time and Materials
There are a few things I do not believe in because I have consistently seen them lead to poor outcomes, and one of them is Time and Materials billing from vendors. When I go to a vendor—and this is a standard I have kept as well—I only do fixed price. When I was a consultant, I always did fixed price as well, even if my employer did not initially appreciate it. That meant I needed to know what it was going to cost to deliver the solution, but also what measurable value it was going to give to the customer upfront. I could prove to them that it was advantageous to take this offering, meeting their business needs and requirements.
Including Buffers and Managing Scope
To manage the risk of fixed price engagements, one of the things I always do is put in a buffer because you just never know what is going to happen. Typically, something like a 30% buffer on the overall cost of the project. Sometimes more, sometimes less. This gave me advantages:
· If the software I was using had unexpected bugs, it would allow time to work through that with a vendor and still meet the project deadline.
· It allowed for a little bit of scope creep. If the project needed a little bit more, or if there was an additional requirement for whatever reason, I was able to accommodate that.
However most importantly with scope creep, you want to document that change. You want to make sure you still do a change request on the project, even if it is for a zero-dollar cost, so that you allow for some room where the scope was not perfect. But you contain it because it is really important on projects that the scope is right. Finally, getting all the stakeholders to sign of a zero dollar change request educates everyone on the project. They know this change is free, or absorbed by the project, but the next one may not be.
Protecting Profits and Ensuring Reliability
From both perspectives, you need to make sure that the service provider makes money. If the scope creeps the other way, where they are spending more time on it than anticipated, it is cutting into their profits. Cutting into their profit means reducing their ability to survive. Your partners’ profits directly correlate to their reliability—that is what allows the directors and owners of that business to sustain it through all of life’s ups and downs.
Focusing on Business Value
As a vendor, it is our responsibility to set our customers up for success. One way we do that is by being really accurate and considerate about our scope, the time the project is going to take, and how much it is going to cost. These are all things that absolutely need to be calculated skilfully so that you develop a reputation for being dependable. Do not’ make your sponsor go back for more budget so that the project can succeed. Set your sponsor up for success by anticipating what they cannot and helping to build their credibility in their business.
Building Capabilities and Intellectual Property
If your partner does not know how long or how much investment it is going to take to deliver, then, in my opinion, they are not an expert in that domain. They have not delivered the capability to businesses over and over and been able to streamline processes, calculate efficiencies, and build intellectual property around delivering this capability. They are simply not that class of service provider. So, find a partner that has tightened the scope of their offerings and where their people’s skills, their backgrounds, and delivery experience surrounds those capabilities. That is very, very important if you don’t want to be an experiment.
Avoiding Unprofessional Practices
We as vendors should never, and we should really stay away from, paying for trips for customers, taking them to fancy sports events or concerts. I simply do not believe in these sorts of things when technology outcomes are the priority. The way a vendor and a company should start working together is by being able to demonstrate the business value to the company in real terms—time saved, money saved, capabilities added. We want to collaborate with vendors that help us do things like risk assessments, mapping gaps in our business to the most appropriate technology that will lead to the greatest chance of successfully addressing those risks.
It is inappropriate for any account manager to be schmoozing the customer into a deal. It needs to be a mutually respectful role. I would like to see more customers pay the bill for vendors’ lunch sometimes as well. Remember, we are all here to make better companies.
Making Informed Technology Choices
We need to have proper vendor selection processes in our businesses, proper procurement processes around the technology we use. As vendors, if our customers do not have that capability, we help them navigate—we bring the maturity. We help them make the risk assessment, build the architecture, and select the right products.
We must constantly collaborate with the best vendors and software providers, refining our offerings in terms of value—not working with the ones we have the nicest perks with or those that have the best partnership programs. Happy customers with great outcomes necessitate us to pick the best software, making us the most competitive vendor by providing the most value.
Avoiding Ego and Bias
Deal with ego. Do not allow ego to inform what software choices you make or what vendors you work with. Sometimes people in IT can be real bullies about this stuff: “No, I only ever collaborate with this company,” or “I’m an insert-product-name-here guy,” and “that’s the way we’re going to go.” This culture of personality is not the way to select vendors or products.
What is the most appropriate software, the most appropriate tooling to solve this problem? Let us analyze all the options and systematically determine which is the best one for us—the one that has the most appropriate support, is the simplest to consume, and ultimately provides us the most value.
Building Trusted Advisor Relationships
We want trusted advisors. We want to be able to work with service providers that we trust, but it cannot be blind trust. We need to understand what they are doing, and the vendor needs to help us understand that. They need to help educate us and build us up as customers. If we have gaps in our knowledge, the vendor, as the specialist and expert, helps fill those knowledge gaps.
Fostering Mutual Success
Success—mutual success—is the goal. That is the game of partnerships. It is not about wrangling and squeezing everything we can out of a partner; it is about knowing that if they are successful, we are successful. It is about win-win relationships. There is nothing wrong with celebrating goals and having mutual celebrations, but we do not want to be businesses that get away from outcomes.
Measuring Performance and Constant Improvement
As vendors, our value lies in using technology to make businesses better. How do you improve anything if you do not measure your performance? You need to be able to measure your performance and constantly improve so that you can provide greater and greater value.
Delivering Maximum Value Through Full Adoption
Using Devicie as an example again, we have customers all over the world—tens of thousands of users benefit from decades of experience in making end-users more efficient and more secure. All that knowledge has been put into a platform and orchestrated at scale. Why? So that we can deliver the best outcomes ever seen around user devices, at a cost that a customer could never achieve by themselves, using skills and capabilities that are very difficult to find in the market.
But to achieve this, we need customers who are willing to commit fully to the process. When a customer brings in a partner like us, they need to allocate the necessary resources and prioritize the implementation. If it takes a customer six months to roll out the solution because other priorities come up, that’s six months of reduced value they could have been capturing.
Even if Devicie is there with all the capabilities ready, the customer needs to start walking. They need to adopt the capability 100% to get the full benefit. Partial adoption leads to gaps—areas of the business that do not have the capability and suffer as a result. When everyone in the business gets 100% value, the partnership truly succeeds.
In conclusion, building successful partnerships with technology vendors is about mutual respect, understanding, and a shared commitment to delivering business value. It is about focusing on what each party does best, leveraging expertise, and working collaboratively toward common goals. It is not about being ignorant about what our partners are doing either, rather it is about being open to be upskilled, to learn and increase our proficiency because of the partnership. By committing fully to the process, resourcing effectively, and adopting new capabilities wholeheartedly, businesses can ensure they reap the maximum benefits from their partnerships. Avoiding the pitfalls of ego, unprofessional practices, and a sole focus on cost allows us to create win-win relationships that strengthen both our businesses and deliver exceptional outcomes.