Services

Relationship healthcheck

There has never been a time when it has been more critical for both Customer and Service Provider organisations to ensure that their key relationships are in the best possible state and equipped to deliver the greatest possible value. To explore your Relationship Healthcheck needs, please contact GBPA.

GBPA’s Relationship Healthcheck enables the current state of a critical business relationship to be assessed, the future desired state identified and the collaborative journey to get there agreed.

The Relationship Healthcheck utilises GBPA’s Relationship Assessment Diagnostic, which provides GBPA clients with a tool that enables the views of a critical business relationship to be expressed from the perspective of both of the parties involved and objectively assessed.

The Relationship Assessment Diagnostic questionnaire content have been developed on the basis of best practice in partnering, developed by GBPA on the basis of best practice in partnering, building on GBPA’s ongoing research - including the results of a partnership survey with over 100 organisations on a global basis that surfaced key enablers and obstacles to partnering success.

The critical areas of the business relationship which the Relationship Healthcheck addresses include:

Vision, Purpose and Objectives: Surfaces the degree to which there is understanding of the need and purpose of the relationship, whether this understanding is aligned both within each organisation, and also the degree of alignment between the two organisations
Collaborative Behaviours and Mindset: Surfaces the impact of behaviour on the relationship. The questions reveal the degree to which people are exhibiting specific behaviours and whether they perceive the behaviours improving, deteriorating or staying the same.
Cultural Understanding: Surfaces the degree to which each organisation understands their partner’s ways of working, language and corporate style, and its impact.
Clarity of Roles, Responsibilities and Resources: Tests clarity around who is responsible and for what, and any issues that exist
Leveraging Capabilities and Strengths: Examines the degree to which the capabilities and strengths of each organisation are being leveraged appropriately in the relationship.
Governance, Process and Systems: Surfaces the degree to which governance arrangements, and the processes and systems in use within the two organisations need to be aligned and are considered to be compatible.
Communications: Surfaces how effectively the two organisations are communicating at all levels.

In addition, the Relationship Healthcheck surfaces the benefits that the parties feel that the relationship has brought to their organisations, the current challenges to be addressed to improve the relationship and its outputs; thereby helping identify where investment needs to be made to improve the relationship’s effectiveness.

The Relationship Healthcheck is facilitated by GBPA to ensure confidentiality and objective assessment. Through utilising the Relationship Healthcheck review process and analysis of findings by GBPA, organisations obtain an independent diagnostic assessment report of the current health of the relationship, which includes GBPA’s Relationship Assessment Map which provides a visual perspective on the areas of (mis)alignment and relative strengths.

GBPA facilitates a review of the strengths, issues and recommendations summarised in the report initially in a session with the sponsors from both the Customer and Service Provider organisations. Following which, GBPA facilitates a workshop of team members from participating organisations to explore the key findings and to reach agreement on the actions to be taken to move the relationship forward to achieve agreed goals and deal with issues that block progress.

Key benefits of the relationship assessment include:

Provides an objective assessment of the relationship to enable issues to be surfaced and addressed collaboratively
Identifies areas for potential greater value realisation
Minimises the risk of exposure to relational failure
Reduces management time spent on issue resolution and enables focus on delivering value
Indicates the degree to which the participants are aligned on the overall objectives and how well these objectives are shared and understood among the respective parties to the relationship
Gives a view on whether specific appropriate behaviours are being exhibited across both parties and whether these behaviours are improving or deteriorating
Identifies both parties’ perspectives regarding understanding and respect for each others’ working styles and whether cultural differences are sources of difficulty or positive contributors
Indicates the degree to which communications and processes are aligned and working effectively between the parties
Enables the participants to examine how well the strengths of each organisation and their respective resources are being leveraged.

GBPA’s Relationship Healthcheck is the starting point for progressing onto The Collaborative Journey™– the step by step process of how to get from the current state of the relationship to the desired state.

To explore your Relationship Healthcheck needs, please contact us.