Chris Soper, Joint Managing Director of Sewell Construction, discusses how partnerships are essential to the construction industry, and what ingredients are essential for building a successful collaboration.

For some organisations, there’s a ‘them and us’ mentality. You’re a customer or you’re a supplier, and the relationship often starts off with competing interests.

That’s not how we work. To us, the aim is to create a genuine partnership with everyone we work with, so we’re all working towards the same goal. If you’re building a health centre, for example, you want it to be the best health centre it can be, you want staff to rave about working there, patients to have a great experience, and the building to look great. That’s exactly what we want too! We want people to see the building and be impressed, we want to involved the community every step of the way, to make a difference to people’s lives by providing modern facilities. So if we’re both looking for the same outcome, why not make the journey as smooth as possible by working together in partnership?

Partnership working can come in many forms, but it’s all about creating a shared sense of ownership, and a collective desire to achieve the best outcomes for all stakeholders. If you truly feel part of something, you’ve got a greater stake in the outcome. You want to do your best, because the end product reflects on you, and your skills. For our construction teams, it’s really rewarding for them to be able to drive past a school, or a hospital, and know that they were involved in bringing it to life.

There are also more benefits to working in partnership. Sometimes, we’re brought into a construction project at a late stage. The design’s set in stone, the budget’s fixed, and we’re just there to follow the plans. Sometimes that’s inevitable, but from our point of view we can add so much more value if we’re involved from the early stages of a project.

Like any relationship in life, partnerships work best when all aspects are in balance, and it’s important to have shared risks and opportunities at the core of the alliance.

As we saw with the STEAM Studios project, building a mutual trust amongst partners is a key ingredient to success. This doesn’t happen overnight, and through the years we’ve found that trust comes from transparency, a joint approach to problem solving, and the ability to have open conversations, no matter the challenges.

Communication is always key. Although partnerships are able to improve efficiencies, encourage innovation and push the boundaries to achieve outcomes that go way beyond a single project, this is only possible if the partners feel able and willing to talk things out as equals. Working in partnership should be all about challenging the norm and creating added value for stakeholders and communities. So as a construction company, we need to be comfortable enough to challenge the client when we feel they’re making a misjudgement, and we also need to be approachable enough that the client can ask for our advice on anything, and know we won’t hesitate to give an honest opinion that’s in the project’s best interest. This is only possible with deep trust and consistent communication.

Partnerships provide more certainty and assurance for the client, through development of a trusted team and shared risk management. For larger programmes of work, they promote joined up decisions to be made for the long-term benefit, rather than doing things in isolation, and a strong partnership can really improve speed of movement and enable things to be achieved a lot quicker and more efficiently.

Long term partnerships mean all partners can learn and grow together. Continued learning drives improvements for future projects, something which isn’t possible on isolated schemes.

Partnerships also promote shared investment into the future, which isn’t always viable with adversarial procurement routes and single project thinking.

In modern day construction, it’s important that we’re delivering schemes in a sustainable way, and leaving a legacy beyond the project. In our experience, partnerships enable this, and provide a platform to allow the project or development programme to have maximum impact.

Generally, we’d recommend that partnerships are considered for all developments which require proactivity and reliability – especially large scale developments, quick turnaround projects, and sensitive working environments.

As part of Sewell Group, we’ve experience of many types of partnerships, and have a number of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) in place, alongside being part of a wide range of Public Procurement Regulations-compliant frameworks. We also have consultancy businesses who can input into business cases, strategic planning, asset management and sustainability.

If you’d like to talk to us more about partnerships and how these can revolutionise your project outcomes, please get in touch.