With projects and programs becoming more complex, requiring more input from more diverse organisations, we are seeing more organisations opt to maintain a central, highly experienced team, and trust specialist partners to conduct specialist services on projects.

The type of partner depends on the type of capability required to support the aspect of the project or program to be delivered. These range from Delivery Partner to Project Management Partner, from Transaction Partner to Strategic Partner to Design Partner.

The right partner can make projects run smoother, with fewer delays, more cost effectively while ensuring you maintain control, adapt to a changing market environment and build and maintain knowledge.

While the benefits are significant, the risks must be acknowledged. Governance change,  unclear lines of control , cultural disruption and uncertain progress, can undermine the effectiveness of the partner approach.

This brief article talks to the four key questions you need to answer before engaging Partner with a particular focus on Capability partner but with lessons applicable across the partnering spectrum.

• What exactly is a Capability Partner?
• Why would you need a Capability Partner?
• How can you get the best from your Capability Partner?
• What are the key consideration?

What is a Capability Partner?

A Capability Partner is more than a contractor. It is a partner organisation who can support you to access specialist skills to help you plan, design, procure or deliver a project, at speed.

The key piece to remember is, to be effective, they must be considered as genuine partners. While you, the client, maintains control, decisions should be made in partnership. This allows you to leverage their specialist skills and knowledge, pushing the outcomes further, faster, than you could on your own.

Why would you need a Capability Partner?

The answer to this question can be found in another question. Do you have what you need to deliver a project successfully?

A Capability Partner gives you immediate access to the capability your organisation needs to scale up, to mobilise on a project, at speed.

It gives you access to top tier talent, specialist knowledge and experienced teams – teams who can provide and quickly initiate, proven mechanisms and processes – allowing you to deliver significant projects to cost and to schedule.

The partner helps ensure your project goes as smoothly as possible. Making sure you have the right people with the right skills in the right place doing the right things at the right time. Remaining flexible enough to adapt to the inevitable changes in the market.

A Capability Partner works well when a project or program organisation needs to scale at speed and, as a result, evolve its systems away from business-as-usual, transitioning from day-to-day management to a delivery focus. This is particularly relevant to an organisation whose purpose has changed, or which has been newly established to manage the delivery of a significant capital investment.

How do you get the best from your Capability Partner?

Treat your Capability Partner as a partner, not simply a contractor.

The right skills are just one consideration. Successful delivery requires more than the right skills. It must consider how each component of a project or program interacts.

Think of the project as a system.

Each component part, the strategy, the transaction, the delivery, are all simply part of overall system. A well-run system allows specialists to trust other functions, to understand and stick to their lanes, to be more effective, allowing other experts to do their expert job.

This is one of the key benefits of the Capability Partner. They align the capabilities within the overall system, working to outcomes you determine, partnering with you and the individual aspects of the project, to unite efforts and deliver on time and on budget.

This is where culture becomes key

The right culture matters, particularly on large, complex projects. The right culture becomes crucial – it becomes the glue in an outcome focused, high-quality, professional team.

You, and your Capability Partner, must align on culture. Creating a shared challenge, addressing issues with transparency and aligned effort, working towards common goals.

Build a high-performing, outcome-focused team, or engage one

High performing cultures take time to create. This is a difficult truth for organisations who are faced with a looming deadline, an ambitious endeavour, and not enough specialist skills in place to start delivering immediately.

This is a core benefit of engaging the right Capability Partner. The right organisation, aligned with your values, brings their own culture, enhancing your organisation, not simply ticking a skills box.

Creating an environment where everyone can operate jointly and coherently together is key

You have three choices, each with benefits and challenges

Any organisation gearing up to plan, develop and deliver a major project understands the need for specialist talent.

When you have to deliver a project, and you know your organisation has capability gaps, you need to bring in the right people with the right skills. You have three options.

• Upskill and manage in-house, by recruiting specialist skills
• Hire in and supplement your existing functions by contracting specialist skills
• Engage a Capability Partner

Hiring new talent, or contracting in specialist skills, takes time – to source, to select, to on-board, to train, to ensure a cultural fit or adapt to a cultural change.

The type of capability depends on the project needs and the gaps in current capability.

The pros and cons of each approach

Upskilling in-house

Pros

Upskilling in-house:

• Enables the leverage of existing governance, compliance
• Delivers long-term operational control
• Maintains oversight and control of high-risk areas.
• Cultural alignment easier to maintain

Cons

• Limited scalability
• Potential skill gaps – and consequent delay in mobilisation
• Requires recruitment, onboarding, and internal setup
• Limited ability for rapid commencement, often a long time required for hiring and capability ramp-up.

Hiring in

Pros

Hiring independent resources in allows you to bridge temporary skill gaps, provide technical advisory, or augment teams (e.g. specialist skillsets to review downstream work), and:

• Allows flexibility
• Reduces costs by avoiding permanent hires
• Brings in external expertise.

Cons

• Relies on availability of skilled external advisors
• Cultural risk as resources may not fully integrate with in-house teams
• If procuring a large number of packages, this approach requires additional resources to effectively manage disparate specialists

Engaging a Capability Partner

Pros

Engaging a Capability Partner works for large-scale delivery, highly specialised, complex, cross-functional work, or when internal capacity, systems and processes are insufficient. Other benefits include:

• Rapid mobilization of existing teams with proven expertise
• Instant scalability
• Taps into specialist knowledge with existing experience in delivering similar projects.

Cons

• Combined set of capability with supporting mechanisms and processes
• Single point of Accountability
• Cost-effective over the long-term
• Potential contract complexities
• Dependency on third parties
• Risk of losing institutional knowledge post-engagement. Risk of reduced independent capacity to operate as reliance on partner grows.

Benefits of a Capability Partner

You maintain control

The risk is that independent capacity to operate will diminish as reliance on your partner grows.

When properly managed, and supported by defined guardrails, robust governance and partnering arrangements, you maintain control.

More easily adaptable to changing and dynamic markets

For in-house and hired-in resources, change can be a bottleneck with highly formalised and control-heavy system. Appropriate and well-calibrated delegations of authority allow the decision to be handled at an appropriate level. A Capability Partner will enable the formation of formal and informal structures, with defined responsibilities, which provide for relevant escalation while you retain ultimate control.

Rapid scaling

Major projects require organisations to rapidly develop skills and capability to deliver the project – and be flexible enough to manage resources through inevitable dynamics of the market.

Partnering gives you access to capacity and capability, giving you:

Customisable teams

• Ability to manage scale and aggregate resource capacity
• Streamlined execution – you’re able to deploy specialists within hours
• Ability to effectively manage change and deal with unknowns and discoveries across the lifecycle of a project.

Specialist solutions

Major projects require specialist skills and capability. The challenge for any organisation is the need to align the focus of specialists on the outcome – giving each stream the space and resource it needs while balancing the needs of one against the other in the interest of project success.

Partnering gives you:

• A single point of contact for client teams to access range of specialist skills
• Top-tier talent on tap
• Access to a wider data set
• Greater capacity to innovate with more perspectives through strategic think tanks
• Lessons learned, through international or cross sectoral experience
• Knowledge of and access to the latest tools and innovations
• Capability and capacity to manage and streamline procurement and supply chain
• Builds the capability of your organisation

A Capability Partner will set in place the structures which build and transition capability to your organisation and the market for future programme and project delivery. The partnering also reinforces behavioural standards, setting delivery-focused culture for future projects.

What are the key considerations?

One size doesn’t fit all for a Capability Partner model. Key considerations for anyone considering engaging a partner include:

• A cultural fit is imperative – tough questions are easier to answer when values are shared
• Othe onboarding process is vital – ensure everyone understands their role and responsibility. Have a clearly defined programme, project governance, expectations, outcomes and client owner role
• You’re both creating a new delivery model – both organisations need to remain aware of the potential need to change their assumptions on ways of working to create a high-performing team. A change agenda should be considered to ensure all expectations are aligned.
• Ensure shared responsibility – clearly identify, and remain true to, the role and goals of your organisation and the partner you choose. This requires shared KRAs and shared delegations – the responsibility is shared, so the decision making must also be shared. Make sure you clearly understand your role. This must be documented and agreed in the procurement strategy.
• Engage someone to help you find the right partner. A specialist advisor needs to be engaged early to shape the strategy and transact the model to achieve integration and get the best outcome for the client owner. This chosen specialist advisor must have the knowledge and resource capacity to run an effective transaction, de-risk delivery and enable cost and time certainty.

To recap

As a simple guide, a Capability Partner should be considered:

• When you need top tier talent on tap
• When you don’t have time to create a culture
• If yours is a new, or relatively new, organisation required to deliver complex program or project
• If yours is a more established organisation moving into new area or sector and requiring sector expertise to complement current in-house capability (learn and leave)
• If yours is a relatively small organisation who has just been tasked with delivering a significant programs
• If you need a skilled team with the depth of experience to ensure you don’t get manipulated by external stakeholders
• When you need to supplement a core team with sufficient expertise to deliver complex programs of work
• When the project faces a looming commencement date and you need skilled people with existing systems and ways of working established behaviours to hit the ground running.

Having helped clients engage Capability Partners across a different sectors, including stadia and precincts, naval infrastructure, water and rail infrastructure, we understand the benefits, the potential frustrations, and the pitfalls. To gain a broader understanding of this emerging options, talk to one of our team or, to arrange a presentation, please contact us here.