Managing risk

All partnerships, services and contracts hold risk. And you can’t outsource risk. In formal-relational contracts risk - and change - are acknowledged openly and upfront and factor into the shaping of the contract. In this way, risk is shared more equitably between partners, and in line with who is best placed to mitigate it in practice. Changes during the life of the contract are mirrored in changes to the management and response to risk.

• Talk about risks openly during early market engagement
• Surface the competing risks and tensions that will exist and discuss them
• Spend time together understanding the different types of risk and how you will treat them and share them: financial, reputational, capability
• Spend time together understanding the size and likelihood of the risk: How great of a risk are they?
• Relate your identified risks back to who they might affect and how they might be affected - it will be different for each partner and for different service users
• Be clear who is responsible for what, and use your principles to focus on mitigation not blame
• Consider having a coordinator who can lead on risk conversations on an ongoing basis
• Develop a process for monitoring risks; a shared forum and ongoing conversation
• Define your process for responding to risks as they arise, including sharing of information at the right time with the right people
• Undertake regular testing of risks as part of your regular scenario planning
• Use your vision and principles and governance to help you manage risk in a way that keeps t

• Making decisions on risk that are clear and well informed, including legal advice, so long as all parties understand the decision and the decision made is proportionate to the risk
• Introducing a partnership/co-ordinator role who can help the partnership manage issues as and when they arise
• Paying organisations to participate in co-design activities to identify and share risks during early market engagement

• The burden of risk is not shared fairly amongst partners making it harder to take a collaborative approach to mitigation
• The process for responding to risks can become too rigid and over prescriptive when partners lose trust