The PARTNERSHIP ASSESSMENT Tool

2010-09-14T02:51:00.001-07:00

The informing choices' Partnership Assessment Tool is an Excel based tool that helps guide Partnership Practitioners through a process to minimise the risks to their partnership ideas and maximise the chances of success.

We feel that it is important that an assessment is made of the potential for a partnership idea to become a practical reality. There are three connected reasons for this:

to build a greater understanding of how likely it is that a partnership will progress to the next phase,
so that we can invest resources in those partnership ideas that have the best chance of proceeding, and
ensure that we quickly and transparently communicate our intentions to proceed or not to the other parties.

To help make your assessment of the potential for a partnership idea to become a reality, this tool poses a series of questions for you to consider. The questions have been grouped into three themes:

The idea behind the partnership,
The individual(s) involved in the partnership, and
The organisation(s) involved in the partnership.

Partnership assessment indicators summarise your thoughts on how fully you have considered and answered the questions posed in each of the three themes. The tool then calculates an indicative overall assessment of your partnership opportunity. Our hypothesis is that the less fully the questions are answered, the higher the risk that the partnership idea will fail.

Here is an overview of the issues to consider on each theme.

The Idea

Our experience of assessing the basic ideas that lie behind a partnership is that it can be a highly iterative process.

The initial idea will often be something that one organisation has considered - this idea will be influenced be the views from other involved parties and a partnership solution will begin to emerge. The evolution of this partnership solution will result in the degree of interdependency (or overlap) between the parties increasing, making the potential for partnership stronger.

If little overlap is found between the parties, then it is likely that the solution is not one that will be delivered through partnership.

The Individual(s)

Our view is that any assessment of an individual involved in a partnership is a highly subjective process and that we would recommend that multiple perspectives are gained to provide a more rounded assessment. Like all the work we conduct in the partnering process, we would expect that any assessment of an individual could be shared with the other party.

The Organisation(s)

We see the final aspect of assessing a partnership as the assessment of the various organisations that are involved in the partnership opportunity. Similar to the assessment of the idea and the individual, we see this process being highly subjective and iterative and again recommend that multiple perspectives be gained to provide a more rounded assessment.

For more information on how we can help you develop successful partnerships, contact us.

See the informing choices website at http://www.informingchoices.com/.