Practical Tools and Guidance for Partnership Development

Practical tools and guidance for Partnership development

A practical guide to building and maintaining effective partnerships

Developed for ASTF partnerships by Citizens Advice

April 2015

Contents

Part One – Context and Basics

The Context

Why should Advice agencies work together?

Critical Success Factors:

The key characteristics of any partnership:

Structure/models

Managing the partnership

1.Communication problems

2.Branding

3.Change of personnel

4.Conflicts of management

5.Information-sharing

6.Failure to deliver & disputes

Part Two - Practical Guide and tools

1. Clarifying the Issue/problem or challenge

2. Staying Positive – wishes, hopes and desires

3. Shared Values and shared Vision

4. Onwards and upwards

5. Utilising your collective creativity

6. Collective decision

7. Sharing outcomes

Part One – Context and Basics

The Context

Partnerships between public services and both voluntary and private sector organisations have been a running theme over the last few years - driven by successive government policies to join-up services in order to improve quality and reduce duplication and costs.

The most visible consequence of these policies is the increasing development of a joint commissioning culture. Local partnerships that bring together key stakeholders will increasingly make decisions about who delivers what. These partnerships are still evolving and take different forms, such as Children’s Trusts and Local Young People’s Partnerships (England), Communities First Partnerships (Wales) and Community Planning Partnerships (Scotland). Local authorities will increasingly play a different role, facilitating rather than delivering services.

The Advice Services Transition Fund was set up for not-for-profit providers of advice services in England to continue to give vital help to people and communities but with a broader aim to encourage models to reduce duplication, measure the difference services can make to people’s lives, and bring providers together to be more efficient and effective.

This remit is not necessarily a simple one for the ASTF grant holders around England. There are numerous internal and external factors that can affect the success of the partnership if not dealt with at the early stages of development.

Criteria for funding streams have responded to the trend for partnership. This is especially the case for public sector funding and for some trusts and foundations where working collaboratively is now often required in order to receive funds.

Why should Advice agencies work together?

Each individual organisation will have its own drivers for exploring and pursuing partnerships and/or collaborations including local agendas, local needs and funding.

Working together has some broad benefits that should appeal, i.e.:

• To have a more joined up approach between organisations working towards the same goal for clients

• To have a common social policy approach.

• To respond collectivelyto the changing funding climate

• To be able to secure new funding opportunities

• To survive in an increasingly competitive market

• To pool resources – knowledge, training, premises, people, systems and equipment

• To enable individual organisations to work to their specialisms – thus providing a much broader service overall

Advice organisations have been facing a number of changes, challenges and dilemmas over the last few years such as the economic climate – affecting both clients and access to funding, increased demand, changes in government policy on welfare and access to legal aid – again affecting not only clients by reduced access to funded legal help but causing a funding crisis amongst the sector, particularly in specialist case work.

Partnerships can provide a way to manage crisis by working together to maintain services, share resources and provide an overall broader service to clients. However, that is not to say that setting up and managing a partnership is straightforward or easy.

Let’s begin by looking at some fundamentals

Critical Success Factors:

Thrashing things out, in open and frank conversations

exploring partners’ organisational cultures, ethics and expectations

getting partners’ agendas out into the open

building up trust through honesty and openness

understand each other’s purpose, and work out how you can fit and work with each other – terms of reference

having one vision or an agreed strategy

honesty about what you can and cannot commit to

clarity about what you are agreeing to, and who is going to do what – roles and responsibilities

allocate time to get things right

explain what you are proposing to your own staff, and not making assumptions about what they think – take people with you

specific and measurable targets demonstrating the added value a project will bring - impact

on-going review and evaluation

strong leadership

early clarity and agreement on branding – managing identity of the partnership and allowing partners to maintain their own identities

proactive staff who are supported to find creative solutions to saturated markets

networking with other agencies; and

credibility of partners – the right partners

The key characteristics of any partnership:

•Mutual recognition of a common issue or set of issues that the partnership has formed specifically to address – this is what has brought you together

•Shared values, defined as jointly agreed values that promote, protect and sustain the partnership culture – this doesn’t have to replace any individual organisation’s identity, but does have to be something agreed on for the partnership to work

•A shared vision, defined as the jointly agreed desired outcome of the work in partnership

•A jointly agreed strategy to achieve the vision through action that adds value

•A jointly agreed structure and way of operating that further the aims and objectives of the partnership – including clear governance, decision making, dispute resolution and competition protocols

•Shared responsibility – a collective ownership of the vision, values and strategy

Structure/models

There are a number of models and structures available for proposed partnerships or collaboration. Which one you select largely depends on the motives, capacity and personalities within the new set-up. It is important to look at the options and weigh up the pros and cons in relation to your circumstances.

The Citizens Advice guidance ‘What Type of Partnership’ broadly describes four main typesof relationship:

•steering groups,

•joint projects (which take broadly two forms:

• without a lead partner [co-ordinated, collective activity] and
• with a lead partner)

•separate organisations

Each of these options serves a different purpose. Consider these and any other structures before proceeding. Your structure needs to work for everyone involved.

Managing the partnership

If a partnership agreement has set out clearly the aims, governance, roles & responsibilities, expected outcomes and plans for review this should help pave the way towards a successful partnership – this is why it is essential to get the preparation or the backbone right.

However, there are other issues which can arise during a partnership which may need to be addressed. Issues can include:

1. communication problems
2. branding and identity
3. change of personnel
4. conflicts of management – styles and personalities
5. information sharing – processes and systems
6. failure to deliver from individual partners, and
7. disputes – how will they be resolved?

We will now consider each of these issues in turn:

1.Communication problems

Communication is vital in ensuring that partnerships remain effective and that trust is instilled between organisations. When working in partnership it is important that all parties:

•ensure that those working in the partnership are clear about their roles and responsibilities and are clear about how they will contribute to the overall aims of the project

•establish clarity about the decision-making process – including understanding who ultimately signs off decisions

•have a clear understanding about each other’s organisational values and goals

•are clear about who the main contacts within each organisation are – both operationally and strategically

•give early warning if problems arise – and that the partnership culture encourages this

•have regular meetings to discuss progress of the partnership; and

•set dates for review

2.Branding

There may be a need to joint-brand projects which involve partnership work. It is important that plans for branding a project are discussed and agreed at the outset to avoid conflict later. Seek guidance on brand-sharing which will need to be consulted at the beginning of partnership negotiations.

3.Change of personnel

A change of key contacts can disrupt effective partnerships. However, this is why it is important to have robust and clear agreements from the outset and to obtain organisational buy-in through clear communication – this should ensure that regardless of staff changes, there will still be an organisational commitment to the partnership which can withstand change. It is vital that there is not just one person in any organisation who has all the contacts and responsibility for the partnership.

4.Conflicts of management

Sharing resources – staff, premises and kit - can create difficulties in managing partnerships. Clear lines of ownership and management are important. Critically it is important to set out clearly at the beginning what will be expected of the project manager within the agreement.

5.Information-sharing

Ideally, organisations should be able to share data in order to limit the number of times the same information regarding a client is collected. However, without one universal system, information-sharing remains a great challenge to effective partnership-working. It is important to understand at the outset how data will be collected, managed and shared. It is important to understand what each partner’s liabilities are for data ownership and sharing and it is important that clients understand how their data is being used. This is particularly important if there are referral systems and processes within the partnership. Reporting requirements need to be clearly understood as well so that data is collected in a way that works for everyone or that can be used easily for reporting to funders, campaigns work and demonstrating impact in order to attract future funding.

6.Failure to deliver & disputes

It should be stated clearly in the contract and partnership agreement what will happen if any partner fails to deliver. All agreements should have a mediation clause to help deal with disputes.

Early action, however, can hopefully prevent partnerships from reaching this point. If either party suspects that objectives are not being met, then the partners should revisit the original aims of the partnership and try to establish what is preventing those aims from being achieved.

Part Two - Practical Guide and tools

1. Clarifying the Issue/problem or challenge

Partnerships (of any type) should form around a specific issue, problem or challenge. It is important that all partner organisations are clear about what this is and that there is a broad consensus about its description. Having a discussion at an early stage ensures clarity of the situation as well as ownership by all.

Simple but core questions to ask are:

•Why are we here?

•What is driving us and this agenda?

•Have we undertaken any internal and external analysis? (SWOT, PEST, Cause and Effect analysis a.k.a fishbone diagram etc.)

a)PEST Analysis

Political / Economic
Social / Technological

Use PEST Analysis to examine the external forces and conditions that may impact upon the agreed issue and the work of the partnership.

•Political: Consider and highlight as appropriate for your partnership:

• Global political influences/changes
• National political influences/changes
• Local political influences/changes
• Stakeholder political situations

•Economic: Consider and highlight as appropriate for your partnership:

• Global economic conditions/changes
• National economic conditions/changes
• Local economic conditions/changes
• Stakeholder economic situations

•Social: Consider and highlight as appropriate for your partnership:

• Global social/cultural trends/factors
• National social/cultural trends/factors
• Local social/cultural trends/factors
• Stakeholder social/cultural situations

•Technological: Consider and highlight as appropriate for your partnership:

• Global technological conditions/developments
• National technological conditions/developments
• Local technological conditions/developments
• Stakeholder technological situations

Review: After you have considered all four elements, review all windows and decide as a group which factors you consider to be positive, which negative and which neutral. Mark the factors accordingly with a red pen:

+positive

-negative

? neutral

Possible Group Task

Working with Larger Groups Use four flipcharts, one in each corner of the room, with separate headings: Political –Economic –Social –Technological

Stage 1: Divide the group into four teams, each working on a separate category. Each team is given a pack of sticky notes. The team should write one influence at a time on the sticky notes, not directly on to the flipchart. After ten minutes ask each team to display their sticky notes on their flipchart.

Stage 2: Move the team clockwise to the next flipchart. The team should:

a) review the notes

b) add any new influences they can think of, writing each one separately on a sticky note.

After eight minutes ask each team to display their additional notes on their flipchart.

Stages 3 & 4: Move the teams clockwise twice more, so everyone has a chance to work on a category, reviewing previous efforts and adding new influences, still using one sticky note for each idea. Allow just six minutes for the third stage and four minutes for the fourth

Stage 5: Make one more clockwise move to send teams to their original category to review all responses. The team should refine, sort and cluster the sticky notes so that like influences are brought together. After 15 minutes the team should translate their thoughts into a bullet point list, writing directly on the flipchart sheet under the category title. Sticky notes can now be binned.

Stage 6: Each team agrees and marks each item on the list as positive (+), negative (-) or neutral (?)

Stage 7: Each team feeds back their bullet points to the rest of the groups. Limit each feedback to a maximum of two minutes. Display the four flipcharts together on the wall, replicating the four windows in the PEST Analysis model.

Note: Depending on the nature of the partnership, you may wish to extend the PEST Analysis to a PESTLE Analysis, covering Legal and Environmental factors also. Alternatively, legal factors can be covered as part of the political category and environmental factors can be covered as part of the social category (human aspect) or the technological category (physical aspects).

b)Cause and Effect analysis

Cause and Effect can be used for a detailed analysis of the barriers or the causes of the problem.

The head of the fish states the problem clearly and succinctly. The possible causes of the problem are identified and written as bones along the spine of the fish – these can vary but for partnership work the following 4 categories can be investigated

•People: What are the possible ‘human’ causes of the problem?

•Place: Are there factors in the locality, environment or facilities that cause the problem?

•Policies: Can causes of the problem be traced to specific policies, strategies or decisions, or lack of these?

•Processes: Is there something in the process that has caused the problem?

2. Staying Positive – wishes, hopes and desires

It is quite easy to get drawn into the negatives after looking at the problems and issues and can dampen the mood and motivation of the collective.

It is essential to get everyone to express and share their short, medium and long term outcomes or dreams for the partnership. This can be done in a number of ways (which one you use is determined by the personalities, the creativity and engagement of individuals).

a)A visual projected timeline

This stimulates imaginative thought and creative expression. It encourages partners to think about the issues in three time frames – reflecting on the past, considering the present and inventing the future.

It uses the famous Bayeux Tapestry as its inspiration. The tapestry tells the story of the Norman Conquest in pictures and symbols, with very little text. Some of it is factual and detailed; while other parts are open to imagination and interpretation.

Invite participants to tell the story of your partnership and its challenges. Instead of embroidery they will work with art paper, assorted colours of crayon or felt pen, and scrap materials (for example balloons, cardboard tubes, paper tissue). Working individually or in small groups they will visit three different zones to show their pictures or symbols

The Way We Were

Think about the past – within the lifetime of the people in the group. Using the materials available in the zone, everyone should draw simple pictures or symbols that represent for them what it was like in the past, in relation to the issue. They may want to draw something they remember fondly or something they disliked. Don’t worry about artistic excellence – just try to get the message across using simple images, no words.