Common views on partnership working

There is a range of views we all hear about what partnerships in general do well and what they do badly.

Partnership positives

• Bringing different people, agencies and values together.
• Focusing them on some shared challenges and opportunities.
• Helping us to look at things holistically.
• Helping us to look at things from different perspectives
• Helping us to look at things critically.
• Helping us to see the need for new projects and processes.
• Helping us to build interdisciplinary teams to run them.
• Helping us to avoid building overly big structures that cannot quickly respond to change.
• Giving us more opportunity to be heard and perhaps to influence others.
• Giving us more opportunity to listen.
• Delegating some of the politics to more local contexts.
• Delegating some of the negotiation and decision-making to those who implement the decisions.

Partnership negatives

• Making time management difficult
• Tying us up in endless meetings and secondment's
• Distracting agencies away from delivering services
• Making it unclear who is accountable
• Giving too much decision-making power to unelected bureaucrats
• Forcing us to work in unfamiliar contexts
• Driving us to 'grab the dosh and dish out the work'.
• Adding to pressures on already overburdened staff.

(Partnership made painless, A joined-up guide to working together - Harrison; Mann, Murphy, Taylor and Thompson)