Why bring an external partner onboard
Internal teams tend to have a business-as-usual focus so don’t often come up against high levels of complexity. Their primary job is to keep the lights on and to keep systems maintained. By contrast, agencies like Ghyston tend to only get involved in complex projects and so naturally there is a greater wealth of experience in high complexity projects within the team.
Agencies also tend to have experience of complexity across a broad range of industries and business problems so the team can bring a cross pollination of ideas. For example, an agency might bring ideas from the manufacturing industries to clients in the service sector and vice versa. This is again something difficult to achieve at scale within an internal team.
At Ghyston, we are also quite unusually technology agnostic so have seen a lot of different technologies applied in the wild and can recommend the best techs and approach to the problem in hand. A lot of the value that comes from this is our exposure to mistakes that have been made by different businesses - we can use this knowledge to make sure you don’t go down the same road.
Tips for keeping a collaborative project on track.
It is key for a collaborative partnership to make sure there are clear and commonly understood goals and objectives. These need to remain front and centre throughout the project. A project plan should have inter-dependencies clearly visible and any tasks where one party is dependent on another should get a lot of focus and airtime in inter-organisational meetings.
All projects should be expected to change as people learn. Collaborative projects have an extra element of change because what one party learns might have a knock-on effect to other parties. If you add to the mix a cutting-edge domain or technology, there’s an even higher level of uncertainty than normal. The important thing to recognise is that it’s impossible to avoid change but it is possible to manage it effectively.
In order to adapt to change you need to be conscious of exactly when it’s happened. That means setting up really good tracking mechanisms on the project from the outset, such as for dependencies, scope, risks and issues.
Communication is key for success.
At Ghyston, we always work as one team with our clients, so every project is a collaboration and that’s what we believe makes successful partnerships.
We make sure roles and responsibilities are really clear regardless of which organisation the relevant people are in. We also try where possible, to create sub-teams spanning the different organisations to avoid sub-teams being siloed from each other.
Great collaboration requires great communication and part of that is making sure that conversations aren’t bound within one organisation. Tools to aid communication range from online messaging, video conferencing through to more technical aspects like design workshops and code reviews. When you put the appropriate emphasis on communication channels you’re setting your project up for a successful outcome.
We would love to talk to you about how we can help deliver your plans – get in contact with us here to start the conversation.
