What is alliance management?
A discipline dedicated to effective partnership
Effective partnerships need more than shared vision. They need shared operations, governance, and decision-making.
What is a strategic alliance?
Strategic alliances are partnerships between two or more organizations seeking to achieve a common goal that neither could reach alone.
The idea of a “strategic alliance” comes from the biopharmaceutical sector, where new drugs are often developed by pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms working together for years or decades. The discipline of alliance management arose to manage the risks and opportunities presented by these long-term, high-stakes partnerships.
But the principles, methodologies, and best practices of alliance management can dramatically improve any partnership’s success rate.
In an increasingly interconnected world, high-stakes partnerships are everywhere — whether it’s a manufacturer and a technology company partnering to create a smarter production system, a network of community service providers partnering to expand access to care, or a supplier working with a retailer to get their products to market.
Wherever organizations come together to create something new, alliance management is the skillset that boosts their chance of success.
The risks
Each organization brings its own culture, systems, processes, and decision-making structures to a partnership. Each gap or misalignment between partners can slow progress, reduce efficiency, and escalate to tension, conflict, and the dissolution of the partnership.
Without effective management, partnerships fail. Failed partnerships represent billions of dollars in lost investment, as well as wasted time, energy, progress, and even lost lives.
Alliance management lets organizations mitigate these risks across the alliance lifecycle.
The Solution
Alliance professionals don’t patch the gaps between partners. They build shared infrastructure — operations, governance, and decision-making — from the start that will stand the tests of time and shifting conditions.
This shared infrastructure allows ideas, innovation, and value to flow freely.
A blueprint for effective partnership
Over decades of practice, alliance professionals have developed a body of knowledge for designing, building, operating, and sustaining partnerships across their lifecycle.
The ASAP Handbook of Alliance Management codifies that knowledge into a practical blueprint for effective partnering: from evaluating potential partners to operational planning, building shared governance, managing conflicts, and adapting to change.
Every partnership is different. Alliance management is the common framework that can help any partnership succeed.
Management across the alliance lifecycle
All partnerships have a beginning, middle, and end, and all partnerships benefit from intentional planning through every phase of their life cycle.
Alliance management provides a structured approach across the Alliance Life Cycle, from initial strategy and partner selection through negotiation, planning, launch, evolution, and transition or exit.
Tap or click each phase for details:
Who are alliance professionals?
You may not have “alliance” in your title. But if you’re the person keeping a high-stakes partnership moving and helping people work together across organizations, you may already be doing alliance management.
Alliance professionals work under many titles. Some manage a single partnership, and others lead portfolios, ecosystems, or organization-wide partnering capabilities.
They share responsibility for making work succeed across organizational boundaries, often without direct authority over the people doing the work.
If that sounds familiar, welcome to alliance management! We hope that both you and your partnerships will benefit from our resources, training, and community — just as the field of alliance management will benefit from the perspective and experiences you bring.
Join us
Learn more about how ASAP membership can advance your career, benefit your organization, and help you unlock the full potential of your partnerships.