September 2020 | The role of Collaborative Relationships in complex Projects presented by David Hawkins

Collaboration is a common terminology in today's business world but is seldom fully understood or fully integrated into working practices.

As major projects become increasingly more complex in both national and international programmes relationships between organisations and their people can represent a significant risk to the parties involved.

The development and publication of the international standard for collaborative working focused on how organisations can take a systemic approach to ensure the appropriate focus on those key strategic relationships.

Project Management topics covered:

• Understanding the strategic implications of relationship management from developing concepts for project management of complex programmes through to the implications of establishing appropriate exit strategies.
• Developing robust business cases to ensure appropriate recognition of performance and risk issues
• The critical impact of appropriate partner selection
• The role of project management to ensure embedding and maintaining the right attitudes and behaviours

David has an extensive career in projects and procurement within the construction industry. For over 40 years he has been associated with the development and implementation of major projects in many parts of the world, which has provided an insight into the many organisational and cultural challenges that projects can generate. Over the past decade, he has been an active promoter of partnering concepts and the development of extended enterprises through the building of alliances. As a strategic thinker, he has deployed these approaches to support manufacturing to outsourcing programmes, capitalising on the opportunities within project operations to exploit global sourcing. Building on these experiences he has helped a number of major organisations to implement change management programmes in different industrial arenas including chemical processing, oil and gas, power generation, and mining and minerals processing. In 2009 he was acknowledged as one of the world’s top 100 thought leaders on CSR. He was the architect and author of the CRAFT collaborative methodology and technical author of the British Standards Institution (BSI) PAS 11000 framework the world’s first Collaborative business relationship standard. He was chairman of the BSI committee that developed BS 11000 to a national standard and led the ISO committee developing ISO 44001 and was appointed as chairman of the International ISO committee post published in March 2017. He has been a regular contributor to professional magazines. As an established author, he has several publications to his credit including:

• Sun Tzu and the Project Battleground: Creating Project Strategy using the Art of War published by Palgrave Macmillan 2004.
• The Bending Moment: Energising corporate strategy published by Palgrave Macmillan 2005.
• Corporate Social Responsibility; Balancing Tomorrows sustainability with Today’s profitability published 2006 published by Palgrave Macmillan.
• Raising the standard for collaboration; Published by British Standards 2013.
• Raising the standard for international collaboration; published by Melrose 2017.