This was a bullet point in a presentation I was looking through the other day.   Since I work for a consulting company these days, the hairs on the back of my neck immediately stood straight up.  And then I thought about it a little bit, and I realized that the reason that I like working for Alliance so much is that we really don’t consider ourselves a vendor to our clients.  We consider ourselves their partner.   That sounds like a pat comment, and one that every vendor would say, but it really is true.

Our CEO buys every new employee a copy of the book The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford, as part of their orientation session.   And the orientation session itself has a special emphasis on teaching people what Alliance means by the RIGHTWay, including having current employees give examples from their day to day work.

Perhaps the biggest proof of all is that our long-time clients actually do see us as their partner.   That’s one of the reasons why we get such a high Net Promoter Score as my colleague Lauren Feehrer recently pointed out in her blog.

Being viewed as a partner is not something that happens overnight.  After all, the root of partnership is trust, and trust is something that needs to develop over time between both parties.  That trust extends beyond an expectation that we’ll tell our clients the truth about our work.   In fact, they see that part right away, because we are very open about sharing the internal status of our projects with them.   From the start, they see all the issues and risks that the project manager has identified with the project, as well as what Alliance is doing to address them and what assistance we may need from the client to address those issues.

In order to get to trust with our clients, we work hard at identifying what Alliance can do beyond the scope of our SOW to help the client succeed – not only with the current project, but with the client’s goals and visions, and even with the individual team members’ personal goals.  We share our expertise gleaned from hundreds of projects and the application of our RIGHTLine framework.  We give candid feedback in a non-critical way to help them challenge their own assumptions and ways of doing business.

In short, our goal is to establish a long term relationship with them.  We seek a relationship that goes beyond a single project or series of projects.  With our closest clients, we are trusted to help guide their product vision by working directly with the business users to determine which features of their product will add the most value to their customers.  With some of our clients, our staff has been there so long that they are looked on as members of the client’s team and as key subject matter experts for the entire division.

So maybe it is true that all vendors lie.  But that’s okay, because our goal is always to be a partner rather than a vendor!

– Lisbi Abraham