Choose your partner wisely

Eyes open when choosing your partner

How customers and their IT partners find each other and how successful the partnership is depends on several aspects. The decision for the right partner is made based on different factors.

Motivated by Nico's post at LinkedIn, I compiled my decision factors.

1. Technical Expertise

The partner should have good technical expertise in the required domain. Especially with frameworks or SaaS solutions and the software stacks used within them, the partner should already have expertise across the entire involved team. Software projects are complex and have timelines. Therefore, the risk increases enormously if there is a lack of fundamental knowledge. Building this up during implementation is not really realistic.

2. Processes

Partners who simply "impose" learned processes (waterfall, agile, Scrum, Kanban, whatever) on the customer run into the problem that the processes don't fit the customer. Customers have framework conditions that you as a partner must adapt to. The other way around becomes difficult. "When you have a hammer, you look for nails" (freely adapted from Silvan Tomkins). And if processes are used, then not dogmatically, but pragmatically and flexibly adapted to the situation. A good value for measuring whether the right processes are being applied is organizational overhead. That is, the number of hours billed for everything other than directly value-creating work. In that case, even cheap hourly rates don't help.

3. Ownership

Every project participant must take ownership. Whether stakeholder, project manager, developer, QA person, everyone else. The goal must be clear to everyone involved and everyone contributes accordingly. And that's why I don't talk about "service providers". Because providing "service" has nothing to do with ownership. That's a Tayloristic term that no longer fits today's times. You only get ownership through being at eye level. And both customer and partner must commit to this.

4. People

All project participants are people. Everything else is tools, even AI doesn't replace everything. Anyone who does "resource planning" in a project hasn't understood point 3. People are more important than the process. Therefore, the partner should have developers who think along, help shape, take responsibility and make the project successful together with the customer. The team must work well together. This includes empathy and sympathy. The best developer is of no use to the project if he is toxic to the project. See this video.

5. Personal Recommendation

What good are awards and the best posts on social media if the reality looks different? In the end, customer and partner must fit together. And all the points above must be right. For this, you can simply exchange views with existing customers of the partner. Personal experiences in daily doing are 1000x more valuable than any award or post. Because in daily collaboration, success or non-success is determined. Not on some stage.

What are your experiences?

P.S.: All personal designations apply equally to all genders (m/f/d). Multiple designations are omitted for the sake of readability.