Sunday, 17 October 2010 00:00

Aligning for Success, Getting Your Ducks in a Circle

Rate this item
(1 Vote)

Picture of ducks facing off

As mentioned last week, alignment is of the utmost importance. Achieving alignment, at first glance, is easier when the supplier works for the same company as the customer, say an IT organization delivering a new application to a business unit. However, from my experience there is little difference. In fact, exploring a vendor's world, where access to the customer is inhibited, sheds significant light on techniques to improve the customer-supplier relationship. Classically, vendors must wait for a request (RFP or RFQ) before they can get access to the customer. Exploring ways of "fishing up stream," as an eloquent account manager friend of mine says, is critical in improving project success. To understand this we need to review a couple of case studies on vendor success and failure.

Customer 1: Flat Panel Manufacturer

To set the stage properly, we will start with the failure. I have to admit, that I never saw the failure coming and it really had nothing to do with the company I was working for at the time. For months, there had been industry rumor about an RFP coming out for a new flat panel display manufacturing facility. With no further warning, late one Friday night, I was forwarded the 135-page RFP to read and digest. It was a cozy weekend, just me, the RFP, and a few pots of coffee.

The initial assessment indicated that the project was worth between twenty-five and thirty million dollars. I mapped out a plan for the resources required to bid the project. On Monday, the key people needing to compile the bid were notified and asked to validate assumptions and questions on various sections of the RFP. The customer declined my phone calls and instead hastily arranged a bidder's conference.

Wednesday I flew to the customer's site for group meeting. Bidder's conferences were new to me and I was interested to see how well it would work. There were eight bidders in the room and three on a speakerphone. The customer had two people in the meeting—one engineer and the head of purchasing. They were having difficulty understanding why there were so many questions. Feeling that the vendors were simply looking to spend all of their money, the purchasing agent refused to divulge their budget.

The customer was determined to make the process fair and shared all vendor's questions and answers in a forum. The rationale was honorable. However, the unintended consequence was that the vendors limited their questions fearing they would show their bidding strategy.

After submitting our bid, the customer did not respond for weeks. The response date came and went without a word of the award. Three weeks after the response date, an email arrived—the customer needed the vendors to rebid. The proposals were all in excess of twenty-five million dollars and they only had five million to invest in the project.

Since it was impossible to bid the request's entire scope and stay in his price constraint, I called the purchasing manager asking for their priorities on the features and functions. His response was that each vendor should remove what they thought was appropriate. He added that they were now three months behind schedule and rebidding needed to be complete as soon as possible. It was becoming apparent that the customer did not understand the complexity of the system or the concept of triple constraints.

In the end, we won the bid and the project started over six months late. Their original timeline was to complete entire project in eighteen months. The project never recovered the lost time and the customer kept changing the scope as they determined that the items chosen for implementation failed to meet their needs.

Customer 2: Semiconductor Manufacturer

About a year later, a rumor surfaced that another bid was in the offing. Learning from the sting of the prior project, I suggested that we start working on the project long before the RFP was released. The proposal was that another solution architect join me at the customer's location (overseas) as soon as possible. We would work with the local account manager to gain access to the customer's RFP team. My boss resisted, basing his concerns on the additional $40,000 needed to get a second architect on site. I replayed the costs of creating two bids for the prior project using full sized bid team. This new approach would take a much smaller team. The project we would be bidding on was estimated between $20 and $30 million. It was a small price to pay. He relented.

Picture of ducks in a huddle

The tactic was to meet with the customer on a regular basis, preferably weekly, and have general conversations about factory automation systems. Jonathan, the other architect, and I would find or write white papers on the areas where we felt the customer needed help. Shortly afterwards we would deliver them, offering to meet and discuss them in detail. We continued this throughout the RFP generation process.

When the customer issued the RFP (two weeks earlier than originally anticipated), all the bidding vendors agreed it was one of the most complete and understandable RFPs they had ever received. The bids were all submitted on time and, as expected, they were all very close in price. This made the selection price neutral. The vendor differentiated the bids based on their feelings of which vendor understood their needs. We won about two-thirds of the project primarily because we were already aligned with the customer.

The project started on time and completed within budget and according to schedule.

Want to read more?

Business environments change daily making it difficult to keep initiatives aligned with the corporate goals. Without alignment the projects and initiatives fail to deliver value. Our Strategic Alignment: The Key To Project Success white paper addresses these issues and what need to be done to thwart them.

Analysis

The first case is a classic example of a vendor "throwing the RFP over the wall" to the vendor. There was no possibility of any vendor aligning with the customer, since the customer inhibited the communication. However, in the latter case, the customer had excellent communication with the vendor. This created alignment on nearly every aspect of the customer's system. Even in areas where the customer's expectations were aggressive and required significant innovation, there was a mutual understanding of what was required and the goals were achieved.

Does this Scale?

Often this is thought of as the worst case for gaining alignment—a customer and vendor who have limited access to each other. However, the problem is just as persistent, if not worse, inside companies. The reason is that in a customer-vendor relationship both parties know they are isolated from one another and they work to close the gap. Internally, the attitude is different. An internal services organization is not required to spend the time being the salesperson. They have a lackadaisical approach and are often missing the tools to identify poor communication or achieve proper alignment. The answer is for internal groups to act more like a vendor and get closer to their customer. It is not that the supplier needs to act like a business; they need to act like the business.

Read 8529 times

Related items

  • Filling Execution Gaps: How Executives and Project Managers Turn Corporate Strategy into Successful Projects
    What Filling Execution Gaps Covers

    Filling Execution Gaps

    by Todd C. Williams
    ISBN: 978-1-5015-0640-6
    De G Press (DeGruyter), September 2017

    Project alignment, executive sponsorship, change management, governance, leadership, and common understanding. These six business issues are topics of daily discussions between executives, middle management, and project managers; they are the pivotal problems plaguing transformational leadership. Any one of these six, when improperly addressed, will hex a project's chances for success. And, they do—daily—destroying the ability companies to turn vision into value.

    Check it out on Amazon or the Filling Execution Gaps website

    Without the foundation of a common understanding of goals and core concepts, such as value being critical to success, communication stops and projects fail.

    Without change management, users fail to adopt project deliverables, value is lost, and projects fail.

    Without maintaining alignment between corporate goals and projects, projects miss their value targets and projects fail.

    Without an engaged executive sponsor, scope increases, goals drift, chaos reigns, value is lost, and projects fail.

    Without enough governance, critical connections are not made, steps are ignored, value is overlooked, and projects fail.

    Too much governance slows progress, companies cannot respond to business pressures, value drowns in bureaucracy, and projects fail.

    Without strong leadership defining the vision and value, goals are not set, essential relationships do not form, teams do not develop, essential decisions are not made, and projects fail.

  • Strategy-Execution Gaps

    The statistics on strategy execution are dismal:

    • 59% of middle managers fail at resolving conflicts in corporate strategy.
    • 45% of middle managers cannot name one of the top five corporate goals.
    • 64% of cross-department/functional issues are poorly resolved.

    And maybe as you could expect from this:

    • 53% of companies cannot react timely to new opportunities.

    You do not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this trajectory is not going to launch most companies’ latest strategic plans successfully. In fact, these data might make you feel that middle management would be better suited as test dummies for the next generation of manned space-vehicle. Granted, the data show there is a dearth of leadership in middle management, but the executive tier has a culpable hand.

  • Process Mapping

    Process is at the core of any business. It makes work predictable, repeatable, and transferable. Without it we cannot scale our businesses. However, process can be a bane to making progress. Processes that work for a $10 million company have difficulties supporting a $30 million company. Trying to scale them to a $300 million company will not only fail but not address the issues that larger companies have that were never dreamt of in a smaller organization. Processes need to be discarded, revamped, and built—all of that without creating an overburdening bureaucracy.

    Anytime you need to go someplace, you first have to know where you are. Processes are never static and your company's current state is probably far from where you think it is. Hence, the first step is mapping out you company's current state followed by defining the future state. This is more than a logical map of the process; it must also include physical maps. Whether your process is solely to provide a service (say, website development) or physical (say, manufacturing) there are logistical issues that complicate the process flow. Without fully understanding those nuances, future state processes will not reach the desired efficiencies.

    For more information about process mapping fill out the form to the left and we will get in touch with you.

  • Kill The White Knight

    There is a reason we hesitate to teach classes on fixing failing projects. Many a cynic feels that we simply do not want to teach our trade, however, our reason is far nobler—we should be teaching prevention rather trying to create white knights to save the day. It is the same philosophy as building a fence at the cliff's edge rather than an emergency room at its base. Our language is replete with idioms telling us to look past the symptoms and address problems at their root cause. 'An ounce of prevention versus a pound of cure' or 'a stitch in time saves nine.' Please, feel free to supply your own in the comments. Unfortunately, most of our businesses loathe this philosophy, waiting to address an issue until it is irrefutably broken.

  • Tales of an Expert Witness: Sex, Lies, and Video Tape (Part II)

    Trust relationships, certifications, and standards sound like such a safe harbor. These sound like such great words in a proposal or statement of work. How could you possibly go wrong building a trusted relationship with a customer by committing to follow a standard? In fact, this can burn you… in court.

    No one ever starts a project with the goal of ending up in court. In fact, litigation may never cross your mind; after all, you have built a trusted partner relationship. Taking a few cautionary steps, however, will make your life easier if you end up in that ill-fated litigious position. Your best chances for success come long before you enter the courtroom—even before the project starts.

Leave a comment

Filling Execution Gaps

Available Worldwide

Filling Exectution Gaps cover

Filling Execution Gaps is available worldwide. Below are some options.

 

PG DirectLogo
Limited Time Price $20.99
Amazon logo
Book or Kindle
Flag of the United States Canadian Flag Flag of the United Kingdom Irish Flag Deutsche Flagge
Drapeau Français Bandiera Italiana PRC flag
Japanese flag
Bandera de España
Flag of India
Bandera de México
Bandeira do Brasil
Flag of Australia
Vlag van Nederland
DeG Press Logo
Barnes and Noble Logo
Books a Million Logo
Booktopia Logo
Worldwide: Many other
book sellers worldwide.

Rescue The Problem Project

Internationally acclaimed

Image of RPP

For a signed and personalized copy in the US visit the our eCommerce website.

Amazon logo
Buy it in the United States Buy it in Canada Buy it in the United Kingdom
Buy it in Ireland Buy it in Germany Buy it in France
Buy it in Italy Buy it in the PRC
Buy it in Japan
Book sellers worldwide.

Upcoming Events

Other's References

More Info on Project Recovery

Tell me More!

Please send me more information
on fixing a failing project.

Sitemap