By helping our clients create an awareness of where they are currently, the strategic direction and path of to achieve their objectives; and carry out an internal assessment to determining the critical core competencies (technologies, products, skills, markets and customers) that they must acquire to meet their strategic goals. Having weighed up the options e.g. Build, Buy or Partner, the last stage is to develop the Partnership Business Case.

This stage involves establishing a clear partnering purpose, identifying a suitable partnership type and developing the strategy around how the partnership will work and how success will be measured. The last element is to determine the partner selection process.

Selecting the right partner is critical. At this stage, the partner selection process is refined and implemented to enable the organisation to find or attract the right players. The partner selection process may involve a tender management process or even searching for, screening and evaluating of merger or acquisition targets. Some key selection aspects include objective alignment, partnership stakeholder identification & management, resource mapping, profiling potential partners for their partnering styles and developing the partnership framework (Governance, Processes & Behaviours). This stage usually concludes with negotiations and agreement in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding or Contract.

Having selected a partner, this stage focuses on bringing the partnership to life. Partnership management and getting the partners to work together effectively in the initial stages is critical for success and is often not clearly planned for. This stage also involves operations planning to work out an effective implementation plan with timetables and deliverables, operation set-up for the nuts and bolts of how the organisations are going to connect and work together and project management to bring all the elements together to deliver the desired results.

This stage is regarded as the true value creation stage where the focus is on maximising the partnering potential. This includes partnership performance measurement, review and evaluation and ongoing partnership management. Marketing and Customer Relationship Management play an important role in this stage, as does auditing the partnering effectiveness.

Partnerships can last for a number of years. However, ongoing partnership management plays a key role in ensuring the partners continue to work effectively together. This stage involves the transition of key people into and out of the partnership and capturing the learning of the partnership to understand how things can be done better and differently. This stage often involves developing a new strategic direction when the role of the partnership needs to change.

This is the final stage of the partnering lifecycle. The organisations involved need to consider whether to finish the partnership, look at different structures or, possible institutionalising. Institutionalising a partnership means building appropriate structures and mechanisms for ensure long-term commitment and continuity.