Alignment Partnering is a robust and sustainable team-building program with built-in, real world processes to manage risk and assess opportunities. It is designed to assist project partners in actually achieving the goals of completing the project safely, on time, on budget and with the specified quality.

Sustainable Team Building

• Builds teamwork through development of sustainable cross-organizational teams-the Executive Team, Project Management Team and Field Team-that cut across traditional company, agency and department silos
• Develops, then regularly assesses, professional respect and trust on the project
• Sets up a horizontal communication system across appropriate levels of competence and authority, emphasizing low-tech, face-to-face and voice-to-voice conversations
• Allows and encourages all parties to concentrate on Project First Thinking-focusing on what is in the best interests of the project
• Provides training, as needed, on partnering, collaboration and facilitation processes and trains team members how to foster and maintain professional relationships among all project team members and other stakeholders

Empowering Decision Making

• Realigns organizations to form teams that develop solutions to issues at the level closest to the problem
• Encourages teams to truly collaborate on a daily/weekly basis because the team's success depends on the participation and contribution of each team member
• Provides the Executive Team with justified confidence to delegate sufficient authority to the Project Management Team and the Field Team to build the project, together with on-going mechanisms to monitor progress against team commitments and goals

Keeping the Project Moving

• Includes an initial kickoff Partnering Session of all project stakeholders PLUS regularly scheduled follow-up sessions with the multi-level teams
• Implements feedback systems (report cards) to address team members' concerns and challenges
• Solves problems in real time while keeping the parties focused on moving the project forward
• Tailors a dispute resolution system that places initial responsibility for resolution with the level closest to the issue, but enables timely elevation if necessary to higher levels
• Assesses communication, trust and professional respect on the job to ensure continued commitment to partnering goals and responsibility at all levels for delivering the project every day
• Anticipates expansion and change by providing the flexibility to add new team members, trade partners and other consultants when they rotate in and out as the project progresses

Alignment Partnering Benefits
Partnering has traditionally relied on a one-session, relationship and team building exercise that ends in a Charter for the job. But experience with partnering has indicated that a more robust, on-going effort with processes to check risk and assess opportunities is more beneficial to the goal of completing the project on time and on budget. Alignment partnering was designed to accentuate the positive parts of partnering while addressing the perceived negatives.

Traditional Partnering compared with Alignment Partnering