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6 ALLIANCES 2017 ALLIANCES 2017 Difference is the power to alliancing Finding the right partners to embark on a collaborative journey is vital, and behaviour assessments can help. Maureen Gaines talks to JCP's Simon Moran to find out more. " With an alliance you don't want to take away the different cultures that people bring," says Simon Moran. "The beauty of alliancing is you get dif- ference, otherwise you might as well go and use your own organisation – if you want everything the same. "That's what the power of an alliance is, you get difference. It's how you tap and tame those cultural differences in a way that they don't get lost, and people come with that common view of we're here to deliver X. They then have almost a second culture when they join them- selves together. That will come out in a typical charter or a framework of how they will work together." This is where behavioural assessment can make a difference, especially during the procurement process. Moran should know. He is an associ- ate at Sheffield-based collaborative working specialist JCP Consultancy, which helps clients, contractors and their supply chains realise the benefits of reduced cost, speedier delivery, increased profit and improved relation- ships from working collaboratively with each other. Thames Water, Anglian Water and more recently Affinity Water feature among JCP's clients. Alliances caught up with Moran recently to discover that accountability and rapport are among key traits for col- laboration; that alliancing is not about being nice to each other; and that alli- ancing is about "parking egos". Moran says there are two elements to consider when it comes to alliancing and the behaviour assessment. There is the procurement process and deciding what type of organisation a client wants to partner with. Then it is thinking about the collaboration as the beginning of a relationship, and gleaning useful data and evidence about how clients, contrac- tors or partners see each other. Moran says: "It takes time to find the right partner – as with any relationship it takes time to settle in. It's also something that you can then take into life once the actual alliance is up and running based on the procurement stages." The first stage of the process is decid- ing the behaviours to be assessed, and which will create a behavioural frame- work. This could be based on the vision and strategy of the organisation. "The sorts of behaviours we're look- ing at are people who think about win- win, accountability, rapport, empathy, strong communications," says Moran. "We then break those into things you can actually see. We all talk about we need to 'trust' people, well how does trust repre- sent itself? How do you physically see it? We break it down into a very detailed list of things you can see, touch and hear." JCP marks the bidders against a set of frameworks and criterias as part of an initial 'CV' assessment. Team leadership interviews follow where the client invites senior team personnel in. Moran says: "This could be the con- tractor leader, or the CEO of the home organisation. Senior team people come in and talk about how they collaborate and behave, their experience of allianc- ing beforehand. Again, we use the behav- ioural assessment framework to score them. "That's a fascinating process because we'll usually have three or four of them come into the room at the same time from one organisation. Does the most senior person do all the talking and eve- ryone else is quiet? Do people talk over each other or do they build on each oth- er's ideas? That's very enlightening to watch." Then there are the two-day behav- ioural team workshops aimed at the project teams. "We tend to mix them so if the client's having seven or eight con- tractors go through the procurement pro- cess, we'll get two or three from each organisation mix them up and o"en put somebody from the client organisation "Often, it's the client that needs to go the furthest distance on the journey of changing their collaborative behaviours"

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