Earlier this year we published a white paper and gave a number of presentations on Seven Habits of Highly Effective Alliance Professionals Who Deliver Value. We described what these people consistently get right regardless of the purpose or business model of an alliance. One of the habits is a focus on being excellent in the execution of alliance management fundamentals. These core practices include, among others, strategic visioning and alignment, establishing efficient operating models, managing an agile governance process, creating alignment, and of course, good communication. Our experiences over the past few years tell us that too often these fundamentals get short shrift amidst the urgencies of the day, having too many alliances to manage—and in the constraints on working together caused by the pandemic.
 
The result: alliance professionals who are missing opportunities to deliver value to stakeholders and alliances that aren’t as successful as they should be. Operational excellence is a mindset of getting a little better every day in the fundamentals of your craft—in making the basics just part of the culture and “how work gets done around here”—so that you can focus on higher value activities. It is about moving from good to great.
 
Herewith are our Top 5 opportunities to help alliance teams be more agile, to make better decisions, and have more valuable and productive partnerships right now. These insights have been gleaned though 1) VitalSigns Alliance Operations Effectiveness Assessments of complex codevelopment, cocommercialization biopharma alliances; 2) baseline assessments of practices against both the Seven Habits and our Alliance Management Foundation model, and 3) numerous roundtables and master classes we’ve conducted over the past two years.
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