Partnership & collaboration: What success looks and feels like
Douglas K. Smith, Quentin Hope, Tim Griggs, Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative,This is an excerpt from “Table Stakes: A Manual for Getting in the Game of News,” published Nov. 14, 2017. Read more excerpts here.
This Tables Stake requires you and your colleagues to probe every single aspect of work – every thing your enterprise currently does or might do – by asking, “Must we do this ourselves? Or, in how many ways might it be wiser to have others do this for us or partner to do this together?”
Success looks like the ‘to’ side of the following from/to statements that demand a range of from/to shifts.
FROM > TO shifts for partnering
| From | To | |
| Mindset and habits | Make vs. buy vs. partner choices happen randomly, if at all in our enterprise | We routinely consider make/buy/partner choices |
| We rarely think about partnering with others as an option | We always consider buy/partner as options | |
| When we get together with peer enterprises, we limit our discussions to sharing best practices | We actively seek opportunities to partner with peer enterprises | |
| We do not set objectives and goals to be achieved through buying/partnering | We have annual as well as strategic goals for partnering | |
| We limit make/buy choices to cost concerns | We consider buy/partner as key alternatives for achieving specific capacity, capability, speed, risk, revenue and cost objectives | |
| We have a narrow set of arenas or kinds of work (e.g. only for content and technology) where we consider buy/partner choices | We subject every aspect of work to make/buy/partner choices | |
| Our front line teams lack authority to choose to buy/partner as options | Teams and leaders from top to bottom of our enterprise have well-defined authority for when they can choose to buy or partner | |
| Partnering discipline, practice and authority | We have no framework for choosing among make/buy/partner options | We have a widely understood and used framework for make/buy/partner choices |
| We lack criteria for choosing among make/buy/partner | We have established and shared criteria for make/buy/partner choices that we use, learn from and adjust | |
| We neither have an executive in charge of partnering nor a senior partnering team/committee | We have elevated the strategic importance of partnering by designating a senior executive to oversee partnering and/or a partnering team/committee | |
| We only randomly or episodically set objectives to be achieved through buy/partner options | Our strategic plans as well as annual plans include specific SMART outcome goals that we will achieve through buy/partner options | |
| While we may have service level agreements with key vendors, they typically spell out the work to get done but not the specific SMART outcome based goals to be accomplished | Our service level agreements with vendors spell out every element of how we’ll work together, toward what purposes and what success looks like in terms of SMART outcome based goals | |
| To the extent that we partner with other enterprises, we typically do so based on handshakes and/or loosely agreed upon terms | We always have detailed, purpose and performance-driven memoranda of understanding with our partners | |
| Number and purposes of shared arrangements | We don’t partner with other enterprises in ways that require their content/edit/tech/business folks to work together with our content/edit/business folks | We have partnerships that span content/edit/tech/business |
| We rarely if ever have partnering arrangements at the desk or other front line team level | Our desks and other front line teams actively make buy/partner choices as key parts of getting their work done | |
| We have no strategy for building a network of local services (such as Belo/Dallas’ ecosystem) that offer customers multifaceted ways to do business with that network | We use partnering to build and sustain a local service network that benefits from cross-selling and cross-delivery of products and services |