Review of the Defence Sector – Part 5
The lucky 5% and the deliberate 3%
These are our concluding thoughts on our last four posts where we have been reviewing a major part of UK Defence sector equipment support relationships.
Conclusion
The collaboration initiative was introduced as a massive change with a blizzard of guidance and mandated, external consultant-led ‘break through’ events for each individual team. Thereafter it was left to team leaders to carry out the implementation. However it is evident that the concept of collaborative working was not fully understood and the adoption of relationship management was ‘hit or miss’. Moreover, no attempt was made by the customer’s headquarters organisation to enforce the published standards and guidelines or to spread best practice. This included HR, IT and other common policy areas. Also it had no overview of relationship performance across its portfolio and thus no means of managing it.
The two areas of greatest impact on the implementation, operation and development of collaborative working were:
The attitude of commercial staff – The impact of the commercial organisations (on both sides) on the collaborative working initiative was disproportionate. In the few successful relationships this was largely due to the enlightened, cooperative behaviour of the commercial staff involved. On the other hand in the majority, progress was held back by a myriad of problems caused by their intransigence.
“Their team had to keep an eye on their commercial man; he had a tendency to go for the small print.”
Joint management – In over 75% of the teams there was no regular joint meeting or communications to objectively agree goals, discuss performance, solve problems and, consider continuous improvement and innovation. In many cases the reason given was “confronting problems would sour the relationship”. It is surprising that this fundamental principle of good management was disregarded.
“It is almost policy that we let these relationships run without much management effort.”