Adventures in alliances land #11 –joint solutions f_build

I’ve been in a lot of debates in the last few weeks about designing and building joint solutions - which is another example of a ‘permanent conversation’.? A ‘permanent conversation’ is something that has been true forever and despite learning it well needs continual effort to align for successful partnerships.? They are points of debate, iteration and friction that are enduring and therefore need continual attention, adjustment and intervention from professional strategic alliances practitioners.?

I’ve been doing, thinking and writing about strategic alliances for more than 20 years.? When something in the alliances space catches my attention that I can share, I will – so if ecosystems, partnerships and alliances are your gig and your passion too I hope you’ll find these scribblings useful.? If you enjoy this article please follow me, subscribe, like, comment and repost.? My book on strategic alliances is here if you’d like to read more adventures in alliances land.? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategic-Alliances-Fieldbook-Art-Agile/dp/103212900X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=strategic+alliances+fieldbook&qid=1691319592&sr=8-1

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On the spectrum of approaches to building joint solutions at one end there is ‘build it and they will come’ approach and at the opposite end is the ‘make repeatable what was bespoke for the first client’ approach.? Somewhere between the two poles is intentional planning to build the solution and go-to-market assets and the effort for making the first couple of sales to win the anchor client and raise the case studies.? Pg 221 of the book offers this advice and example:

Even in the ‘incubate’ stage, it is useful to be able to describe to a distributed team the approach that will be taken to create offering assets. Once the first few projects start rolling and it’s time to move to ‘big bet’, it’s essential to have a predictable joint approach to continue developing the offerings together. Without a proven process to follow, the virtual team’s time will end up being prioritised to other initiatives that can demonstrate their path to success. The authors have seen a lack of ability to describe when resources are required and what their deliverables will be add many months to the timeline for developing a promising idea. The venture capital industry inspired offer funding model, discussed in newsletter 18, is a useful start to solving this, but needs to be translated into an actual plan for a specific offering once it has passed the ‘seed funding’ stage. The graphic below is an example of how the offer funding model might evolve into an offer development process plan. This illustrates the high-level timelines for each stage in the Gant chart at the top, the list of deliverables bullet pointed in the middle and the resource pyramid in the table at the bottom.

Whilst this is just an example, it is common to see the resource count for even a modest offering to run into more than 50 days. The PS firm will have a cost for each role readily at hand as its BAU for them to price work by the day. The senior staff who would be required to build a new offering will carry loaded costs between $500 and $1,000 a day and client bill rates of $1,000–$3,000 a day. This means that to staff a team for 50 days constitutes a minimum cost of $25,000, and an opportunity cost because they are not client chargeable of greater than $50,000. This is the reason that PS firm’s running offer development teams ‘side of the desk’ can take many long months to spin up new offerings because they are trying to squeeze in a material amount of work around their day job. The point on duration also brings us to another value of having a widely understood and repeatable process for offer development. Going through a process, the organisation will become familiar with how much time it takes to build a new solution, will create mechanisms for funding it and learn how to accelerate. This means if it’s a priority, the organisation benefits from the structure of having a predefined approach.

Building a strategic alliance joint solution – how does your alliance plan for it?

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