Worksheet2 Who to cluster with
Who to cluster with | 2.1
The experience of Collaborate — and of previous resource-sharing projects — is that successful resource-sharing clusters depend on good personal relationships between the key people in the organisations taking part. This is because, in order to make real progress, the members of the group need to be able to trust each other and rely on each other to do what they say they will do. As the member of one pilot group put it, "participants need to be in a position to commit and deliver".
Give and take
Successful clustering also relies on a willingness to “give and take”. An example of this is that most of the Collaborate pilot clusters came to agreements early on that some of their group’s budget should be allocated to bringing some of the smaller or less well-resourced members up to a level that would enable the group to move forward together: this was most common in the field of ICT.
getting to know you
Developing this sort of relationship from scratch is hard; clusters will get off the ground much more quickly if each member knows at least one or two of the others. Each of the Collaborate pilot groups had been meeting prior to taking part in the programme. In the case of Nottingham and Durham, all or most of their members had already been involved in consortium tendering with each other – although in Durham, the group invited a fourth organisation, which had not been part of the consortium but was felt to be a strong natural partner, to join them. In Bolton and London, the group members had been meeting as a network and had decided to go to the next stage.
It’s not necessary for each of the members to know all of the others, and it is unlikely that they will; one of the pieces of feedback coming from the Modernisation Fund is that, while the organisations which were contemplating working in partnership had previously had a degree of awareness of each other, few knew each other well. What is important is that, as far as possible, there is a network of relationships which binds them together, and that this is underpinned by shared values.
Because it is unlikely that all of a cluster’s members will know all of the other members well, a key aim of the early stages of the clustering process is to give members a chance to get to know each other better by working together.
shared places
Another key feature of successful clusters is that they tend to be geographically coherent. This is important for two reasons:
it makes the business of meeting easier, and thus increases the chances that everyone will turn up (this is really crucial in maintaining momentum);
it means that the members are more likely to have aspects of their operating environment an common — in particular, funders (and funding problems), networks, contacts, suppliers and infrastructure resources.
The greater the degree of overlap in these things, the better the chances of finding a productive focus for the cluster’s work, and for the cluster members to be able to pool contacts and resources and raise their collective profile and impact. Three of the four Collaborate pilot clusters had all their members operating within one Supporting People authority.
shared values
However, it is possible for non-geographic clusters to work. The fourth Collaborate pilot (the London project) was bound together by a particular specialist focus (they were all BAMER domestic violence
projects), and by the particular threat to their type of service posed by the tendency among Supporting People teams to commission generic domestic violence services in preference to more specialist services rooted in a specific community.
the right number
The clusters in the pilot programme had between three and six member organisations. Experience suggests that these are about the minimum and maximum numbers needed for developing the relationship of mutual trust on which successful clustering depends