How to get the best out of your collaboration with your service provider?

As a project manager I worked with and for external service providers. The collaboration between the parties involved was not always, let’s say, optimal. Here are some tips on how to make sure how you both get the best out of the relationship:

1. Invest time.

For me this is the most important one. As a client you need to invest time in your project as well, you can not expect the service provider to understand everything you know. Make sure you, or someone you trust, is available for questions. Make sure the development team can count on you.

The more time you spend on your project, the better the outcome.

2. Listen and work together.

It’s a bit like parenting, if your child is in trouble, you want them to be able to talk to you. So you (try to) listen and don’t get upset if you receive bad news, or mistakes are made. You are there to support them.

The same goes for your service provider, you don’t want them to hide things from you, you want them to discuss problems openly, before they get too big. That way you can find solutions together.

3. Work with each other, not against each other.

It’s not a race, nobody has to win, the project has to win. You don’t need to beat your service provider; they don’t need to beat you. Your collaboration should be beneficial for both of you.

4. Don’t micromanage.

In the first point, I indicated that you should spend time on your project, this doesn’t mean you should try to control every aspect of the development process. Trust your service provider, they should be capable of determining how to do their job. You can spend your time better and with more impact, your service provider can spend their time better than answering to you for every single decision they make.

Trust is the key.

5. You determine why, your provider how, and both or you are responsible for what is delivered.

As a client, you are responsible for the vision, the reason why you do the project. Make sure the project team understands why you do this and repeat it a lot. Decisions made in the projects, priorities set, should be made with your vision in mind.

How it should be developed is up to the development team, they have the expertise, they know what is best in the long run. If you try to undermine their expertise and take shortcuts, you will pay for it later.

What should be done, is a collaboration. You are both working on it, so do it together

6. Make things clear up front.

You should make it clear up front what success means, how to deal with bugs, incidents, changes,… Make sure it is not fuzzy or vague, because this will only add to frustrations and resentment later on.

Plans can change but agree on how to deal with this change.

If you are starting a new project or your project is already started and you think the collaboration could be improved, don’t hesitate to give me a call, the first coffee is on me!