The Silicon Alley Insider ran a piece on February 1 that detailed the frustrations of a UK advertiser with Google and DoubleClick. The article started with this comment: “We have seen in the past how many mergers and acquisitions in digital media have been disasters.” And it went downhill from there.
For those of you who’ve spent more than a week at any company anywhere in the world, it’s no surprise to hear that a client is unhappy with the service received from a vendor. It happens quite often, especially when the client fails to take the time to perform a detailed business requirements analysis and then fails again to properly review, in detail, the vendor and offering before committing to an agreement for service. I’ll even go so far as to wager that at least one vendor you work with right now isn’t delivering the goods, especially if you’re at a large company.
But the blame doesn’t completely fall upon the shoulders of the vendor. It’s more complex than just poor service and a crummy product roadmap. It’s about broken windows, on both the client side and the vendor side. And it’s also often due to really, really bad management.
This is same management who continually promote incompetent people or, for no reason anyone can identify, are promoted themselves. These people can usually be counted on to go forth and execute deals that produce unpleasant results, as the e-mail writer in the article shares (and then fix blame on some unsuspecting underling!) Maybe GoogleClick really does suck in the service and product road map departments in the UK (and elsewhere), but I’ll bet the product selection process in this case wasn’t as robust as it could or should have been, resulting in the e-mail writer’s company selecting an offering that wasn’t really suited to their business needs. I could be wrong about this, but I’d be willing to wager I’m not.
On the one hand, it’s all good, because it keeps consultants like me in business. But for those of you who really want to cut down on the pain and overhead you deal with on a day-to-day basis, here’s some advice that’ll help ensure a greater chance of success for anything you do, from choosing a vendor to managing a complex project, and even managing your kids:
Manage Expectations
You must clearly establish what you expect from the vendor (this comes from your needs analysis) and what the vendor can expect from you. There’s no short-cutting here. You don’t just wake up one morning and decide you’re going to use GoogleClick as your ad serving platform. It takes research, time and competent people to make a decision like this. Fail to clearly establish and manage expectations from the start and you might find out later that the product you’ve chosen won’t support multiple currencies, time zones, or worse yet, has no provision for interfacing with your financial systems. I’m green-lighting here, but you get the idea.
Assign Responsibilities
Here’s the answer to that nagging “Now What?” question. Make sure everyone involved is a stakeholder. Now, I’m not using the term ’stakeholder’ like some of the management wonks you’ve encountered might use it. I mean put your ass on the line and take some owenership of the process and the project. Making sure everyone has a reason to be involved and shares in the up or down-side of the outcome. Assign responsibilities to everyone to ensure the expectations you’ve set previously are met.
Feedback
You, your team and everyone else involved need to be relentless about follow-up and feedback. It’s the crucial link in the chain. The more you communicate, the better chances you have of success (back to my original thought; this works for just about anything, from choosing a vendor to managing a complex project and even managing your kids). Make constant feedback part of your DNA if you want your projects (and anything else you do) to succeed.
There you have it. My secret formula, guaranteed to reduce pain and overhead in three easy steps. 
I’d love to hear from you – please leave a comment with your thoughts.
