Friday, March 05, 2010
Supplier Managers and Olympic Hockey
The Supplier Manager Is Like the Coach Of An Olympic Hockey Team
Its funny how our current focus areas are usually the product of several streams of consciousness. I suppose it all comes back to the old saying about the product of our efforts being greater than the sum of it parts.
As a Canadian I am still enjoying the afterglow of the most successful Winter Olympics in Canadian history, with a record breaking Gold Medal win. This feat was topped off by the entire nation watching the Canadian Hockey team win the final medal game in sudden death over time. (What a rush!)
My second stream of thought has been focused on the topic of Supplier Management. A subject I decided to research and write about early in the new year as it began to dawn on me that there is a growing strategic requirement to successfully integrate external suppliers of both classic and cloud based IT services into our IT value chain and management models.
I understand fully that we have been in the business of outsourcing both operational and strategic services to external suppliers for some time now. The question of course is how successful have we been at this up to this point. This is further complicated when we treat them like outsiders versus adopted family members. A challenge I have written on before: Your IT Outsourcer - A Brother of Another Mother
The difference I see today is that this landscape is about to get a lot more complex now that we are also moving to off premise cloud services for both business and technical services.
Having just returned from a very successful Pink conference where I spoke on the topic of ITIL in the Clouds I made a statement that I had initially written on this blog: Choosing to use cloud services is a choice to outsource multiple slivers of your IT value chain. In my article on this subject as well as in my session I made the case that it is critical to integrate our suppliers into the ITSM Management processes for delivering services to our business partners in a secure, reliable and cost effective manner.
For this reason I personally believe that Supplier Management is the most important / strategic Service Design process for companies to get right for the next decade and beyond.
So how does the concept of Supplier Management relate to Olympic Hockey you might ask? (I was hoping you would 
)
Consider for a moment how an Olympic Hockey team is formed. A Senior Management group selects players from multiple teams and assembles the best possible talent from all of these different sources to create what they hope is a team cable of great success. However, the challenge that an Olympic hockey coach faces is that while they have assembled star players into this new team they come from very different hockey clubs. Each club has its unique style, culture and ways of getting the job done. What they have to do is to take these individual talents “suppliers” and get them to start playing as a cohesive team with a common play book. (Enter a company’s IT Management Framework)
In my weird way of looking at life the Coach for an Olympic Hockey team performs the same role as a Supplier Manager in multi-sourced IT Management environment. The Supplier Manager helps an organization to pick the right players for the value network and then ensures and contracts that they agree to operate by the common play book (ITSM Processes).
Otherwise what you get is a lot of individual talent moving the puck towards the goal as a team of isolated individuals. Any Olympic hockey team that cannot make this transition from talented individuals to a cohesive team approach will never get close to a medal round let alone ultimate success and glory.
If you think about it for a moment this scenario is exactly what we are faced with every day in IT organizations that have multiple suppliers that are not integrated well.
To close this article let me share with you a case study that I picked up at the Pink conference this year.
As I was running from one of my speaking sessions to the next I was stopped in the hall by a person from a company that we had done ITSM consulting with in the past. He was very excited about telling me about a project related to Supplier Management that he had recently been involved in and asked if I would have some time to sit down and discuss it. Not being able to stop on route I made a lunch appointment with this person and I am so glad I did.
At lunch he let me see a manual that he and a team of people had created to help manage and consolidate over 81 separate supplier contracts in a sane and consistent way. In this manual they had created common Service Definitions. (Eg. Database Administration) Instead of each supplier providing their own definition and set of attributes for this service they were asked to bid on a single common definition. This allowed the organization to multi source the same service to several provides without risk or variance between serve offerings.
Also in this manual was a detailed description of the core ITIL processes that the organization had defined / deployed and the expectations of involvement that were required of all suppliers around policy, process, roles and key performance indicators. Example: Incident, Problem, Change, Service Asset & Config, Release and Deployment, etc) In short a common play book for all parties regardless of what team they originated from.
This was the most beautiful ITSM thing I have seen in a long time. (Sigh: I know but it’s the life I lead) I wish I could declare who this was but he asked for anonymity. My hope is that he can present this project at next years Pink’s 2011 Conference.
So in closing I would ask you if you have an Olympic Hockey Coach / Supplier Manager working on your team that is not only focused on getting the best players for the cheapest price but also defining a strategy to take individual talent and build it into a team with a common vision, goal and play book for success!
Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?
”Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” ~Andrew Carnegie
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