Babel Teka

Maybe you haven’t yet thought about building collaborative business relationships and the many benefits they bring. Would you not agree that a collaborative business relationship is crucial if not essential to your business relationships with those you do business? With Moez Kassam you can learn more about how to work effectively with others in today’s business environment.

For many years, my main focus has been on winning projects and delivering them with success as a consultant as well as as an international business leader. I learned that the key area I should be focusing on is building, nurturing, maintaining and maintaining relationships with the people I worked alongside.

This part of business comes to some people more naturally than for others. For others, we need to work at it.

Now, we have a framework which will help you and me develop business relationships. In October 2010, the British Standard Institute – BSi – launched Part 1 of its specification BS11000 collaborative relationship business relationships – A framework specification.

A specification of how to develop collaborative relationships can seem to be too rigid for some people. Although this is true to a point, we can see that the 3 words in the title of “collaborative business relationships”, especially collaboration may help us overcome this issue to some degree.

Let me share my thoughts on how you can use the specification to create mutually beneficial business relationships with your collaborator business partner.

What does collaboration actually mean?

Sometimes, people confuse communication and collaboration. Collaboration does not include communication.

In general, collaboration refers to when people agree that they will work together in order to reach a mutually agreed upon outcome. To make collaboration possible, there are four elements:

Communication: discussing what we’re going to do.
Agreement: How will we behave and work together
Action: What we do to deliver.
The end result is creating value that we cannot have done alone – this is why we need to collaborate

The words “business relationship” and “relationship” can also be seen within the contexts of a strategy roadmap and the two internal perspectives Learning and Growth, Organisation, People and Data. This perspective is the “relationship”, and is intangible. The second perspective of Internal (Management Procedures) is the “business”. It is tangible.

You are part and parcel of a company, which has both physical and intangible assets. These assets can help you support and deliver a project or new products and services.

Your tangible “business” assets are your physical buildings, equipment, and the numerous business processes that you use for your work. The best way to save money and increase your collaboration is to harness and reuse these assets.

The intangible relationship assets are your Organisation’s leadership, alignment and teamwork. People who work alongside you – their expertise, knowledge and experience – make up the Learning and Growth aspect of your business. This represents 70% of the value of your company and will be the most influential factor in your success.