Barnsley: breaking boundaries with strategic Partnering

The biggest lesson he has learnt since he did his first partnering job in 1997 is "how hard it is to change culture". People don't like it, they moan, they complain behind your back. It can be unpleasant, says Hilton, which he thinks is why some people shy away from trying.

He's currently immersed in a change involving 1,000 people across four organisations, a strategic partnership to look after maintenance and new build of the council's housing stock, worth £22m a year. There have been upheavals all round, not least among Direct Labour Organisation (DLO) employees, one third of whom have been transferred over to Inspace Partnerships, part of Willmott Dixon.

"Partnering on projects involves about nine people, 12 at the most," says Hilton. "The strategic partnership is an immense reengineering process. It's very, very complex."

The move to the partnership came after a consultation exercise that threw up 10 criteria which were important to tenants. The council looked at 13 procurement options and finally settled on one which saw two-thirds of the work going to its in-house DLO and one third to an outside firm.

In order to achieve a reasonable profit, rather than one which just keeps it ticking over, the contractor must meet stiff improvement targets year on year. These relate to customer satisfaction, costs and timely delivery of the service.

Sensitive souls
One of the greatest challenges is how to change the mindset of the tradesmen. "It's going to take time," admits Martin Bates, partnering director at Inspace. "They've been working for the authority for many years and are used to that environment, which can be restrictive. They weren't allowed to do anything else apart from what was on the order. Now they are more empowered to do that little bit extra."

The tradesmen have also had to get to grips with new technology, receiving jobs and reporting back on their progress using handheld devices. The majority have adapted well, says Bates, and it should mean that they are getting more work done. The workers are incentivised on productivity – all their terms and conditions of employment were transferred over with them – but Inspace is discussing with the unions at the moment how bonuses might be remodelled to also include aspects of customer satisfaction.

Bates' advice for others is to take it slow and talk, talk, talk: "Don't underestimate people's feelings about change. Delivering maintenance is the easy bit, it's the integration of the two quite different cultures which has to be handled sensitively."

80% of Barnsley’s work is partnering. “We almost take it for granted,” says head of property and procurement Keith Hilton

Hilton reckons that changing people who work in offices is even more difficult than asking the tradesmen to change because they are used to doing one task one in one way and they just don't want to do it differently. So what can you do? Workshops, training and by constantly challenging people, says Hilton, is the only way. He describes himself as a "hands-on manager" who gets about and talks to his staff so he can work out how people are feeling.

Barnsley and Hilton have been going through change for years. The strategic arrangement for housing maintenance is the latest move in a development process that started back in 1994 when Hilton read Sir Michael Latham's Constructing the Team report and got excited about partnering. "I did it because I though it was a better was of procuring. If you think that three people sitting together in a room are going to do better than three people sitting in different rooms sending e-mails, then you believe in partnering. The rest is methodology."

Damage limitation
Barnsley Metropolitan Council is now seen as a leading light for partnering, carrying out 80% of its work on that basis; 60% on its capital projects and 100% of housing through the partnership. "We almost take it for granted now." Hilton, a self-confessed workaholic, has advised his peers up and down the country. Currently he estimates he is working with 50 other local authorities and doing two presentations a week. He has also been involved in looking at how strategic partnering principles can be applied to procurement across the board.

Hilton has advice for beginner authorities. First, be hard with your staff. Some of the authorities he works with to introduce partnering are not strict enough, he says, with people who don't have the right mindset. "If someone causes me a problem with partnering, then they are taken out of the game and put onto traditional contracts. They can cause a lot of damage." Sometimes, for example, the architect wants to direct the way everything is done. "People revert to type very easily."

Councils combine
Hilton tells the story of the second partnering job he did. It was a failure. The project manager was "short on experience but a nice bloke". The architects took advantage, the contractor produced a good building but lost money. "My team had a right roasting for the next three months," says Hilton.

Be honest about the improvements you are making. Measure a project's cost against historical data. Too many local authorities take the original price pre value engineering and call the reduction the saving. "If you don't get the starting point right, you don't get the incentives right for improvement," says Hilton. He poo-poos other authorities' systems of pre-setting healthy profit margins because that takes away the incentive for the contractor to innovate and improve.

For a big council like Barnsley the opportunities are perhaps more obvious than for smaller ones. The latest plan is to join forces with nearby authorities to use the same supply chain. He is currently helping Doncaster with their 'decent homes' programme. Since both authorities will be doing the same thing in the same area, won't it benefit everyone?