PARTNERING
Pioneered by the Army Corps of Engineers as a means of bringing harmony and collaboration to the public works construction industry – traditionally one of the most litigious branches of U.S. commerce – Partnering is a means of focusing various parties with a stake in the outcome of some process on the commonality of their interests, rather than on their own more parochial self-interest.
This is how the construction industry described the technique:
“[Partnering is] a long-term commitment between two or more organizations for the purpose of achieving specific business objectives by maximizing the effectiveness of each participant’s resources. This requires changing traditional relationships to a shared culture without regard to organizational boundaries. The relationship is based upon trust, dedication to common goals, and an understanding of each other’s individual expectations and values. Expected benefits include improved efficiency and cost effectiveness, increased opportunity for innovation, and the continuous improvement of quality products and services.”
Construction Industry Institute
While first used to facilitate relationships between owners of public works projects and their vendors and constituents, the techniques have also been successfully applied inside individual enterprises to improve relationships between different departments or functions, for example, or between management and staff. Potential applications are endless.
Rich Livingston is the recipient of numerous national awards for Partnering facilitation. Let him help you determine whether this is something that will have impact for your enterprise.
PRESS RELATIONS
Press Relations may be considered a sub-set of public relations, but we would argue that dealing with the press requires some skills that may be different from those required to deal with the public. A comprehensive press relations program will certainly include a crisis management plan, but the real intent, generally, is to build a positive working relationship with the media before – and independent from – any specific interest in engaging media support.
Tricky business, because the media can sniff out flackery from a considerable distance.
That’s not an insurmountable obstacle, though, since what the media is absolutely dependent upon is news, and most enterprises have information which, carefully managed, can be positioned as genuine news. Everyone’s interests are served. An ideal relationship, in fact, is where your enterprise has been identified by the media as the go-to source when they are in need of specific information; where your group has been identified as a repository of expertise.
PRODUCTIVITY ENHANCEMENT
Simply put, everyone is confronted by a need to do more with less; to optimize productivity.
The principles developed by the Toyota Production System to enhance manufacturing productivity – often known in this country as Lean Manufacturing – can be adapted to almost any workplace systems, whether they be production-oriented or information management.
The notion of “efficiency experts” in the workplace is nothing new, of course, and the concept carries a good deal of negative connotation, much of it well earned. On the other hand, it is rarely a good idea to cut costs without also improving efficiencies, and some sort of objective analysis can usually demonstrate opportunities for improvement that would produce meaningful ROI: the proverbial low hanging fruit.
There is the apocryphal story of an office that until quite recently continued to produce hundreds of pounds of automatically triggered reports every day, the sort that used to appear on green-lined continuous-feed computer paper. Someone would collect the stuff coming out of the printer, carry it across the room to the shredder, and…
Don’t laugh too quickly. Can you be absolutely sure that nothing similar is happening in your organization? An outside overview can sometimes identify such things that are all but invisible to people who see them everyday.