Picking Your Partner

I'm not much for New Year's resolutions.  History shows I just don't keep them.  Take my first New Year's celebration, for example.  My Dad told me I could stay up to ring in the new year if I could put meaning into it by making a resolution.  My resolution was to swear off chocolate cake.  So I rang in the new year with my folks; afterwards, they asked me what I thought of it.  I responded that it would have been better with chocolate cake.  It's been all downhill with resolutions ever since.

So this year, rather than making resolutions, I decided to count my blessings.  I made a list of the things that make my life great:  personal and professional.  No question I'm a lucky guy; I came up with a long list.  Lots of things about my health, my family, my friends, my job, and so on.  And I'd like to share one of the really cool parts about my job here, because I think it has relevance for many of the folks who read my ramblings on this blog.

One of the really cool things about my job is that I get a bird's eye view of quite a few Oracle HCM Cloud implementation projects.  It's an opportunity to learn a ton from the experiences of others in terms of what works and what doesn't.  And I see what customers go through in picking Oracle implementation partners.   It can get to be quite the beauty contest with various partners promising different approaches and prices in attempting to win the business.  Evaluating partner offerings can get pretty complicated; hardly a week goes by that I don't get someone asking for guidance in evaluating partners and their proposals for implementation projects.

One indicator customers should consider in evaluating implementation partner offerings:  does the partner have consistent communication with Oracle's HCM Cloud Development team?  The Oracle HCM Center of Excellence team (I'm a member of that team) holds regular "cadence calls" with a number of Oracle implementation partners: strategic partners, emerging partners and industry specialist (i.e. Public Sector, Higher Education, Healthcare, etc.).  In those cadence calls, we talk with partners about their current projects:  the approach, the current status, issues they're working through...whatever is relevant to the success of their projects.  I'm fortunate to engage in some of these calls:  I learn a ton and get to provide some help as well.

So thinking about all this, the thought struck me:  if I were a customer picking from several partner proposals for an HCM Cloud implementation, I think one of my selection criteria might be whether or not a partner is communicating with the HCM Cloud Center of Excellence team on a regular basis.  Because there is nothing quite like getting pointers from the folks that built the software.

Happy New Year!