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Registered social landlords are well aware of partnering and the agenda outlined in Rethinking Construction, Sir John Egan's 1998 report on the future of the construction industry. There is also a strong desire to adopt a more modernised and cohesive approach to construction procurement – particularly as off-site manufacturing becomes more common, with the procurement changes it brings.

Problems emerge, though, when they actually try to do this, most often in one of two areas: making the necessary culture change in the in-house team or defining, at an early stage, precisely what inputs and systems are needed in order to get the required results.

Break down the barriers
Changing your team's culture doesn't mean handing out a mountain of information to technical, development and other staff on how to manage the procurement process along with their standard-issue key performance indicators pack. It's more a case of getting people to approach things differently.

To begin with, you may need to produce a series of workshops and papers covering the more tangible issues, such as forms of contract, risk management and process control. You must also reinforce collaborative working practices and break down barriers of "them and us". This won't be easy. You are asking staff to move away from what they have been doing for many years, apparently successfully.

Culture change is an incremental process: people need to see for themselves that partnering can achieve better outcomes more readily.

Change culture, not just the badge
One of the biggest risks of early partnering ventures is "migrating backward", where what is called partnering becomes nothing more than a traditional system with a different badge. It may well cost more but delivers the same. Usually, this happens because of complacency or a problem arising. To prevent it, you should appoint an in-house partnering champion to keep the momentum going. This does not mean you need extra staff, but it does mean supporting and developing an existing staff member, or members, and empowering them to deliver successful partnering.

Talk to customers and partners
The design of systems and processes will also develop incrementally. This can be hard for some stakeholders to accept and agree to – after all, it is hard to agree to something that is not yet defined.

But it does allow two essential processes to take place. The first, and without doubt the most important, is the effective and early integration of the customer into the development of partnering, bearing in mind Egan's comment that "the customer is the ultimate judge of value". The importance of involving customers early on cannot be over-emphasised; it brings a fresh dimension to all considerations and should be viewed as critical to success.

The second is the integration of your construction partner at a stage at which the entire system of processes can be refined or changed to add value to the outcome. Bringing together these two key stakeholder groups puts the focus on starting with the finish and asking what you want to achieve.

Review your processes
Once you've reached an agreement, review all of the interrelated processes to see what value they bring to the outcome, robustly challenging each to see if the process is really needed or if it can be improved on.

From here, a more definitive system can be established with a range of focused key performance indicators. Be clear on what benchmarking data you collect and what value it has. Many of the earlier partnering projects collected data on just about anything you could collect details on, resulting in information overload and a lack of attention to the crucial issues – not to mention a few less trees.

If you go through these processes with key stakeholders involved and committed, your partnering venture will be effectively targeted and well-placed to achieve the success you and your customers want. But there is still a great deal to do – after all, you haven't started working on-site yet.