We certainly aren’t clairvoyant, although we have a crystal ball that sits on a shelf in our library. If you try to look through it, what you see is pretty murky. To the contrary, we believe the future for alliance management is coming into focus.

Collaboration is the strategy now. The ally leg of the build, buy, or ally strategic decision has claimed its rightful place.

Moreover, functional managers who once cavalierly said, “We can do it. We don’t need professional alliance management support,” are realizing it isn’t as easy as it seems. They now want support. Maybe not for everyday interactions and routine governance meetings, but for guidance in planning for inflection points.

Portfolios are being rationalized as biopharma research and development budgets shift to fund expensive later stage trials. Money is tight and many companies have impending patent cliffs. The results include ending collaborations with one partner absorbing the relevant asset(s) and winding down collaboration. “Who is managing this transition?” the head of discovery asks. “My team is,” the head of alliance management responds. “It is part of our remit now.”

The impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US on pharmaceutical research budgets are not clear – nor does anyone understand what the next Trump administration portends for the industry and science in general. Your CEO has an upcoming presentation on this topic to the Board of Directors and realizes she has a blind spot about how co-promoting partners who are in charge of pricing are thinking about this critical strategic question. “Get me the head of alliances – now!” she demands of her chief of staff.

These are just a few examples we’ve been engaged with in 2024 when alliance professionals were key stakeholders to ensuring executives had the necessary data and, importantly, made their decisions incorporating an alliance lens.

What does this mean for 2025? We offer the following crystal ball predictions, informed by our current interactions with leading alliance management teams.

1. Recognition of the importance of alliance management grows

OK, we, ASAP, and the few other alliance management consultants who have been focused on building the profession have been saying this for each of the 25+ years alliance management has been a recognized management practice. Evidence there is momentum includes:

• An increasing number of alliance management teams are adding the integration of acquired assets and companies to their remit.
• Additional alliance management specialty teams are being formed to handle partnerships in areas such as digital health, drug safety, and international operations.
• Alliance management teams in mid-sized companies who are recognizing alliances are core to their strategy are accessing funding for both professional development and a digital platform.

2. Heads of alliance management focus on creatively scaling their capability

Alliance managers are realizing they can’t be spread too thin. In many companies of all sizes, but especially large pharma, they are supporting more alliances than they effectively can. That is a direct path to being seen as an “administrator,” which no alliance professional wants. What is desired is to be a trusted advisor. That requires being integrally involved in the project teams and governance committees. As one executive who moved from big pharma to a mid-sized company told us, “In my last company, the alliance managers set up governance meetings and took minutes. That was all they had time to do. They didn’t know all that much about the alliance. In this company, the alliance managers are the experts on the alliance.”

Yet even in mid-sized and smaller companies, the workload can be daunting. It will only become more so. Thus, the question for 2025 is, “How can you creatively scale?” Three strategies are essential to pursue:

• Using generative AI to gain efficiencies in routine work, such as agreement summaries and obligation monitoring, analyzing metrics, and preparing meeting presentations and minutes.
• Adding an alliance management operations role to enable more effective use of data in decision making – both in terms of providing functional experts with better information and for driving alliance management excellence.
• Implementing (or better utilizing) an alliance management digital platform to manage workflow, enhance communication, and produce the data required to drive alliance management excellence.

Each of these strategies must be customized for the company, its current and expected alliance portfolio, and the maturity and size of the alliance management team.

3. Help alliance teams become more alliance-aware and self-sufficient

You can’t be everywhere. How can you be confident a project or working level team has sufficient knowledge about the confines of the agreement so that it doesn’t get off-track? Or that it considers the downstream implications of its actions? In addition to the benefits alliance teams and governance committees gain from the efficiencies described above, we are guiding alliance management teams in efforts to help teams be more self-sufficient. What does that entail? Again, we offer three ways to implement this priority:

• Acknowledge that the initial knowledge transfer that happened at the alliance startup has been forgotten. Keep reinforcing the confines of the agreement – but without referring to the agreement. People tune out contractual talk very quickly.
• Have a champion for each alliance in each major function. Deputize subject matter experts to be your proxy in matters that relate to their domain. It may be one person, or you could create a mini team. Work with them to understand the implications of the agreement, working through likely scenarios, especially for key inflection points and probable areas of disagreement.
• Create a community of experts. Work with their managers and human resources/talent development to ensure people have recognition for their efforts. Also, these are people that provide bench strength or a pipeline of future governance members.

Enabling key functions to be more self-sufficient helps them avoid missteps and implement collaborative leadership techniques that can reduce the swirl and churn that too often happens when team get stuck in an information void.

4. Engaging executive stakeholders more strategically

Alliance professionals have frequently been challenged in engaging their senior executives on alliance issues. When they get an audience, the default is often to focus on updates that are about development and commercial activities and events, not forward-looking decisions that require a cross-functional, portfolio-wide perspective. Alliance management teams are working to understand each executive’s interests and shaping their communications individually. A few of the ways alliance professionals are updating their executive conversations in 2025 include:

• Bringing their executives strategically relevant insights, or information they can use in personal interactions, about partners’ and individual executives’ priorities.
• Advising executives on the second and third order consequences of alliance decisions, not just on alliances, but on the overall portfolio.
• Proactively recognizing opportunities for additional value, such as securing additional rights, leading contractual amendment discussions, and negotiating to reallocate limited supplies.

Update your stakeholder engagement plan to focus on what matters most to individual executives. Find ways to have non-update conversations with them. Bring them valuable information they cannot get elsewhere. You will build your trusted advisor status with each interaction.

5. Standardization takes on a sense of urgency

Consistency of practice is part of building any organizational capability. For too long, many alliance management functions have not been cohesive teams that apply practices that stakeholders know to expect. They are more frequently collections of individual contributors. Yes, every alliance is different, but we know there are practices and processes that when applied, contribute to more successful alliances. Over the past few years, we’ve shared our data that says alliance managers should focus on:

•  Alliance operations: Standard alliance management strategies by portfolio tier that define the priorities and deliverables of alliance management, the interface with internal governance and functional leadership, and the transparency and timeliness of information flows (including standard metrics) between partners and within an organization.
• Effective JSC leadership: Driving alliance strategy to realize intended value, ensuring decisions create the highest value for all, and demonstrating collaborative leadership.
• High performing collaborative teams: Ensuring comprehensive chartering that guides the team’s interactions, proactively planning key inflection points, building learning and reflection into their regular operations.

There is another benefit to standardization – it helps teams scale. When there are tools, templates, clarity about deliverables and accountabilities, the proverbial wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented. It is also easier to reallocate responsibilities and onboard new people.

Crystal balls may provide a murky view of the future. We are crystal clear that 2025 will be a good year for the alliance management profession in life sciences.