Rapid decision-making means your company makes money, saves costs and averts risks. So how do you enable your alliance team to accelerate decision-making?
In our early onboarding workshops with new allianceboard clients, we often find that alliance teams don’t have a way of consistently tracking issues and decisions across the alliance portfolio. This matters because several problems occur:
Agendas to align internal stakeholders, governance committees or external stakeholders are pulled together manually and often at short notice, which means that important issues risk being missed.
If an Alliance Manager leaves, important knowledge about the alliance is also lost and outstanding issues go unresolved.
The absence of a global view of decisions managed across the alliance portfolio means that a Head of Alliance Management has no way identify and resolve the roadblocks slowing down decision-making.
Overall, the alliance team risks remaining in reactive mode, not using its Alliance Managers optimally and operating below its full potential to support the business.
How does digitizing your Alliance Management operation help resolve issues and accelerate decision-making?
We suggest 3 steps to resolve issues and accelerate decision making in your alliance portfolio.
Step 1: Capture all issues and decisions in one central system
As suggested by the Handbook of Alliance Management produced by our knowledge partner, the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP), Alliance Management best practice requires a central system of recordkeeping for all issues and decisions.
allianceboard’s decision log makes capturing and tracking all decisions for your alliances easy.
Start by agreeing within your team what types of decisions need to be captured for all alliances, or, in larger alliance portfolios, for each tier or type of alliance.
Establish priorities and set deadlines from within allianceboard. Update team priorities at least every few days. All team members and internal stakeholders see what needs to be resolved and by when.
This means you’ll never lose track of an issue or decision-point again and keep your stakeholder to pace.
Step 2: Engage internal stakeholders, create JSC agendas instantly and base decisions on one version of the truth
allianceboard makes communication up the chain of command a snap, saving precious team resources. Our platform automatically notifies stakeholders what decisions are due and allows stakeholders to self-service an up-to-date report or e-mail providing all relevant information.
Figure 1 shows a simple point-and-click report containing three top decisions that need to be made for selected alliances within a given division – perfect for the next update call with the Senior VP of that division.
allianceboard also enables instant, point-and-click creation of Joint Steering Committee agendas. These automatically list all decisions for consideration, allowing your Alliance Managers to spend their energy resolving issues and creating opportunities hands-on, rather than merely administering them.
The ultimate step involves your external partners. allianceboard’s intelligent and secure system of access rights allows your partner to see – and co-manage – those decisions that you decide to manage jointly. One version of the truth always helps accelerate resolution.
Step 3: Accelerate resolutions systemically over time
If you want to make faster decisions, it’s imperative to track the turn-around time. Yet most Heads of Alliance Management today do not know:
the average number of days it takes for a decision to travel from “identified” to “resolved”
how this differs from partnership to partnership or business unit to business unit
how Alliance Management headcount affects decision speed
Use allianceboard’s powerful analytics to look across the portfolio and prioritize actions that accelerate decision-making systemically, once and for all.
A single cloud-based platform that visualizes all decisions across the alliance portfolio and is accessible to all stakeholders – internal and external – is critical to streamlining decision-making and minimizing risk.
Download our Solutions Overview to find out more. Or contact us today to speak with one of our senior alliance management experts about digitizing your alliance management.