Through
their backgrounds in the Energy, Construction and Utilities sectors, Sandra and
Anthony both have many years experience in Alliancing, a model of project
management that grew, in Australia, out of the construction industry.
What are the commercial
requirements of Alliancing projects?
Anthony:
Alliancing in its current form is a big process. Lets say you have three
organisations that get together to bid to build a hospital. Those three bidders have to form their own
alliance. In an example alliance I was
involved in there was involving three major Melbourne based multinational
construction groups who agreed to bid for a $450m project.
These
individual organisations had to get agree and align about roles,
responsibilities and money. They had to
agree who is going to lead and there are a whole lot of legal requirements even
at this stage, just to put the tender together.
Then there is the clients bidding process with a number of different
groups who have formed alliances. This
effort is multiplied as each bidding group has gone through a similar
alliancing and tendering process. Then
there is this second work-shopping stage, which leads to the successful bidder
being chosen.
Once
they are selected, the successful bidding alliance has to be aligned with the
client. This doesn’t happen
automatically, it involves further discussions and workshops about roles and
responsibilities to align everybody completely before you start. For large-scale projects it’s an expensive
process. It generally costs over a
million dollars.
Sandra
– I have coached alliancing teams on how to work together, to help them
understand and learn how to behave in a different way to their normal processes
that they go through, where they just stand up and do a presentation.
One
bid we did, we had to identify how we would recruit the best people out of the
organisations that were there, and how we would do it to gain them to come and
work on the alliance. We had 30mins to
come back with our response. So we did a
theatre production of The Hobbit! We had
Gandalf, who gave the vision, and Bilbo Baggins who was the messenger who
talked to the people.
Rather
than just wanting a presentation, the client wants to see how well the teams
work together and whether they can think outside of the box.
Commercial Arrangements
For
large complex projects, there are legal agreements that are put in place and
solicitors are involved to ensure due considerations are documented thoroughly.
There
are agreed ways of working. The partners
agree formally on how they will work together.
They also agree on what the risk factors are and how the risks, the
gains and the losses will be shared.
It’s
documented in the contract upfront how much money each party is going to
make. Also if there is a profit, above
what the group expects, how that will be divided up. What we’re talking about here is total
commercial transparency and this is what people find the hardest.
Sandra
- I remember sitting in with two colleagues involved with Alliancing projects
in Australia and in the New Zealand health industry. What they did really well was to create a
really great environment for people to say I feel really uncomfortable about
telling you and about my costing details are and what my profit is.
You
might be in an alliance with other competitors, for example if you were in the
construction industry you might find John Holland and Theiss – two direct and
powerful competitors - working together.
These direct competitors still have to commit to showing these details. It asks questions of peoples ethics. You really start looking at all of the
qualities that people bring to an alliance.
This element of the selection process therefore becomes very different
to what you would normally have in a commercial project.
This
a major change from common commercial practice in other partnerships or tender
agreements. But what it does is that it
stops people from being greedy.
An
example is a project that was conducted to build the Royal Children’s Hospital
in which the owners did form an alliance for the project. They would have contracted a group to
facilitate the project.
The
selection process is very different from procurement or even partnering. Bidding groups would put forward their
representative teams. Once all he
bidding teams were confirmed, to start the Hospital would have first bought in
solicitors and explained the process for selection to the teams. All the different bidding teams were then
taken away for a two-day program. There
are representatives from within the hospital also involved as a panel.
The
Alliancing facilitator will work with actual live scenarios. They will then give the teams live example
scenarios, to work through and demonstrate their solution. Anthony – I was in a number of bids for
alliances and I remember workshops where ‘out of the blue’ the panel would say,
we’re now stuck in this scenario what would you do? What they are actually looking for is to
understand how does each team actually relate to each other. Do they work as individuals or do they work
collectively and collaboratively? If
they are coming into an alliance they need to be fully committed to the
collective.
It’s
not about the skills of the teams because it’s generally assumed that if groups
have got to that stage then they have the technical skills. They are also looking to particularly see how
they handle conflict. How they resolve
differences. Interpersonal skills. Creativity.
These are the abilities that are really important to the alliance, so
that is what they are being measured against.
They
would have the project manager identified and they would be watching him really
carefully to see, for example, whether he takes the lead all the time or
whether he shares it with his people.
Does he defer to his people and include them or does he do all the talking? They keep them overnight because it’s
different when you go to dinner. You can
put on a performance pretty well for a number of hours, but if over night you
go out to dinner with everybody and then are back into it the next day, it’s
harder to fake it.
How could Alliancing be
applied creatively within the Health sector?
For
the full formal alliancing process that we have described, with tenders and
legal agreements and two-day workshops to be utilized, you would need to be
building a hospital or running another big health related project, for example
as it has been used by New Zealand District Health Boards. But I do think that with a smaller team and
smaller projects you can use the concept and get that process up and running
with an outside facilitator.
One
interesting option that hasn’t been explored before is in the hospital
environment. Hospitals would benefit from learning to aligning nurses, doctors
and administration staff. The alliance
would be within the organization. What
I have observed is that they are different entities altogether. I hear Doctors complain about nurses, nurses
complain about Doctors, and they all complain about the administration
staff. It’s almost like saying 'this is
the organisation, how do we create an alliance within the organization with our
own people?'
Anthony:
My experience is that usually in very senior roles you have functional managers
and they tend to run their function separate to everybody else, and as a result
they conflict with other departments, they don’t actually work together in
unison. If you just went in to a large
organisation like that and said that ‘we’re going to bring principles of
alliancing to this whole place and for a particular project we’re going to work
towards one vision as one entity towards this outcome. So you align all the divisions in the
organisation for the outcome rather than individual outcomes for each group.
One
thing that we’ve noticed, having been through major multi-million dollar
alliancing projects, is that the breakdowns happen at the transition
points. So you come from one system into
the next, and it’s the transitions where it all screws up. For example, if you look at the information
collection points. If a medical record
is collected well then it’s easy for it to go to the next system. But if the initial collection is not good and
clean and easily transferrable then the handover to the next department is no
good and then they don’t fix it so when it goes all the way along the line
inefficiencies develop. Clinicians have
to repeatedly gather the same information or they have different ways of
collecting information.
It
would be much more efficient to work together right at the beginning by saying
lets collect as much information as we can for all our needs at one point. This gives stakeholders the ability to also
consider new ways of getting information that they may not have considered
before. You see, they may have always
been collecting it one way but simply need the opportunity to question if it
needs to be done this way, or if it could be done differently.
It’s
always the same. It’s the handover spots
which is where the clunkiness happens and usually each just complains about the
other, but in an alliance model they two groups have the opportunity to say
‘hey, we’re not communicating well here, lets sit down and align how we can
make this work.
What are the steps
involved in the alliancing process?
In
summary
- You first need the facilitator to pull the management team together and agree on the project that the group wants to do.
- A project group is then bought together
- The facilitator works with the group to get the roadblock issues on the table and to agree on principles they are going to work by during the project.
- They would then facilitate the rest of the project process. First by facilitating the initial planning required by the management team.
So we start the alliancing process, by working towards and gaining an agreement of how we are going to behave as a group and identifying a number of key principles by which the alliance operates.
Then,
because people have the opportunity to speak in a safe and trusting environment
they get to unload their junk, which is a huge step forward. In these situations, you don’t generally
have to deal with every individual issue that comes up. There are usually three or four issues that
are the major ones and when you deal with them, the rest cease to be problems.
Sandra
- An important part is to start of by going through all the issues that people
bring to the partnership so that everything is on the table. As a facilitator I would use four questions
what are the issues here? What does it cause to the organization here? How do
you fix it? If you do fix it, what does it give you and the organization?
This
is done in a workshop scenario. As this
point we also generally bring in a manager to talk about the organizations
expectation and vision. From there
though we run the program as a neutral facilitator. Often what comes up are issues of
confidentiality and trust. I need to be
able to re-assure a person what is said in the room is in confidence and what
leaves the room is by agreement. At the
end of the day the group agrees, what is going out. Because often people who come to join
alliancing groups simply need to be able to talk about problems that are going
on.
There
can be things that are considered ‘unspeakable’ within the organisation and
until you get them out of the way you can’t get anybody to agree on anything. What I have found as a facilitator is that
issues that arise might have been going on for a long time, even 10 years or
more, that is still playing itself out.
No matter which new manager comes along, and what they say, people are
still seeing and hearing what they want based on these old longstanding
issues.
So
a first step is always to get the departmental issues out in the open and
simply work through them, so that the group is able to move forward. You have to do this otherwise; you will not
be able to get anybody to agree on anything.
Once
the principles have been established of how the group will work together, the
primary aim of the workshops is uncovering what the issues are and coming up
with solutions. These solutions then go
to management. Ill also work with
management as well because management want peoples input but when they get it
they don’t always listen.
Management
can sometimes think they should have all the answers and they can sometimes
think they are losing control. This type
of decision-making system can cause them to question what their job is
now? I work with them to help them
understand that that they do play an important role of engaging with people,
and that if they do that well they don’t have to make all the decisions.
I
will be taking management through the same process so that they are also able
to open up and speak candidly about the same situations about what they see as
the issues. Often they are exactly the
same as what the people reporting to them are saying. Sometimes their issue is that ‘I’m not
understood upstairs and that I am working with all these rules and boundaries
around me’. They might know that what
the operational workers are saying is right, but they’re limited because
they’ve not got the support from above.
Within
the workshop, you have to work through the layers to get to the top, because
what is going on at the operational level is a reflection of what is going on
at the top.
In
an alliance process, most of the work is with the leadership team so that
they’re totally aligned and that they’re modeling the behavior that they want
from everybody. If they walk into a
workshop and I say ‘I want you to speak openly and honestly’ they have to show
that this is what they actually want and that people are not going to get
punished for speaking up. All of this
stuff sounds great in a textbook but when you’re confronted it can be quite
challenging to work with.
Also,
how are they operating as a team?
Because they are the model of the whole workforce. So I do one on one coaching with them and
also sit in on management meetings and provide feedback on process. Ill always ask initially whether they want
feedback in the group or later in a one-on-one setting. But later on it’ll be in the group
environment. Some can handle feedback
initially others cant.
Then
facilitating down through to the project teams who work through the problems
and identify the solutions. But you
would treat this group as an alliance, not just as individual departments
within that organisation so that the alliance principles could be utilized
where the group is all working together for the good of all.
The
ongoing alliancing process involves having a number of regular facilitated
workshops. As a facilitator, I probably
come in every 4-6 weeks depending on what is happening within the
organisation.
As
the end of it, the individuals would have learnt about and taken on the
principles and processes themselves.
It’s a facilitative way of leading.
They would start to work that way in their normal work.
I
did some work in a large construction group once and there were managers there
who had been on a big alliance and they were sad that it was finishing and that
they were going to be going back to doing procurements because alliance wasn’t
happening and more. I said to him ‘you
are a facilitative leader! You naturally
lead this way and you don’t have to be in a formal alliance to keep doing
this. Once you have had the experience
you can create it’. I caught up with
somebody last week that was on that project .
He is a very senior manager now with another multinational construction
group and is very much a facilitative leader.
Now
back when he started on the alliancing project he was an environmental manager
and he use to check everybody’s desk at the end of the day to see what they had
been up to. He was a total
micro-manager! He was really bright and
a great guy, but everybody knew how micro-managed them and they were all
complaining about it. As a facilitator
during the alliance, I had to really challenge him on what he was doing.
When
he spoke to me the other day, 6 years later - he’s just turned 40 - he
highlighted how he understands the big picture and focuses the change in focus
has not only freed up his workers to do their jobs, it has freed him up to
focus on organizational wide issues.
He’s learnt these skills through the facilitation process from
alliancing. He said to me, I wouldn’t be
doing this job if I hadn’t been through that alliance.
It’s
a skill of taking people out of content, and bringing them up to context! If you are caught up in the detail of the
undergrowth you cant see above the trees to the rest of the forest. Usually when we go to a worker about changing
a system for example if we’re talking about the flow of paperwork in a
hospital, they will talk to us about the detail and the individual steps. But the overall context of how everything in
this system impacts on the wider environment and vise versa is just as
important, but there are not many people who can live and work in context.
Seeds
of Possibility are a business performance consultancy. They bring a wealth of experience in alliancing across different industries and Sandra
has also worked closely with a Key consultant to a New Zealand District Health
Board, who pioneered Alliancing within the New Zealand Health system. What Seeds
of Possibility do differently is that they work
with clients to improve systems and engage people both at the same time.
As
Anthony highlights ‘ I saw a recent Gallup poll that revealed over 70% of
people in the workplace are not engaged with the work they do which astounded
me. ‘But it’s no use engaging with your
people if your systems are no good, because if your systems are no good, the
people disengage”.
When
you get those elements right and include how you align everybody – the
alliancing component - the organisation becomes powerful and strong and make a
difference and get great results. Their contact details are:
Conscious Leader
anthonyosborne@seedsofpossibility.com.au
Mobile +61 413663360
No comments:
Post a Comment