Collaborative Journey™

In response to relationship challenges associated with Customer / Service Provider relationships – including complex, multi-sourcing relationships - GBPA has developed The Collaborative Journey™ to enable customer and supplier organisations to move from transactional, through collaborative to effective and sustainable value adding strategic partnering relationships.  To explore your Collaborative Journey needs, please contact us.

All organisations have Customer / Service Provider that are critical to their success. However, do not know whether they are established and working in a way that brings added value. The Collaborative Journey™ has been specifically designed with ‘added value’ at its core. 

When helping organisations go on The Collaborative Journey™, GBPA facilitates conscious learning so as to develop and embed the business relational and collaborative capabilities, behaviours and processes that better equip organisations go on subsequent collaborative journeys.
GBPA’s Collaborative Journey approach equips organisations and their key service providers to:

• Assess the nature of the relationship currently, and identify any misalignment between the perspectives of parties; eg the customer & service provider organisations
• Build a roadmap to move the relationship into the desired state and address specific issues hindering the development of the relationship
• Develop appropriate collaboration skills with key players in both the customer & service provider organisations to enable effective management of the relationship
• Reduce unnecessary cost by minimising issues that tie up management time
• Establish the foundations for achieving the agreed goals for the relationship
• Reduce risk of relational failure and non-delivery.

The approach is not prescriptive, and draws on GBPA’s tools and frameworks as appropriate in an agreed programme. GBPA generally facilitates the following phases to enable the Customer / Service Provider organisations to understand the current state of the relationship, address the key obstacles to progress, and agree and implement The Collaborative Journey™:

• Scope: Select relationships and individuals to participate, and agree what type of relationship is needed
• Assess: Relationship assessment to diagnose current state of relationship from each parties’ perspective, and identify the future state to be achieved on The Collaborative Journey™
• Surface: Joint workshops to address issues raised in assessment, and map out The Collaborative Journey™ for achievement of agreed goals
• Action: Implement relational change plan, underpinned by skills development and adoption of appropriate relational behaviours and processes
• Review: Progress review of relational change, identify areas for improvement, and agree actions to move relationship forward collaboratively.

The Collaborative Journey™ is underpinned by appropriate GBPA Services, Tools and Frameworks to enable the desired dialogue to take place, including: Relationship Assessment Diagnostic & Healthchecks, Relational Diagnostics, Individual Mentoring, Behavioural  Framework, Alignment of Objectives, Sponsor / Stakeholder Interviews & Advice, Individual / Team / Leadership Collaborative Tools, Collaborative Team Development, Joint Workshops, Relationship Management Skills Development and Relational Indicators.

An aspect of GBPA’s approach which is unique is that GBPA works with both parties – ie the Customer and Service Provider organisations - which enable collaboration to be built at each step. GBPA also provides diagnostics which measure both the behavioural and relational improvements.

To explore your needs and to find out more about The Collaborative Journey™, please contact us.

The Collaborative Journey and The Collaborative Sourcing Journey are GBPA trademarks