Twinning means that two parties are both fired up about a topic or a goal.
Just as with twins, two prereqisites are needed. Firstly, there must be a common focus. At Liesen this constitutes, of course, the core values of loyalty between LTT Liesen and its business partners, respect for different cultures as well as the entrepreneurial thinking and interests of the project leader.
Loyalty and respect as fundamental business values.
Common values do, on their own, create a further important success factor in international project work, but they do significantly increase the resource flexibility of the project manager and the quality of communication. Knowledge transfer gets better, an important demand of management quality norm ISO 9001:2015,and expensive mistakes through loss of information can be avoided. However, even that still isn’t enough to justify the success of Twinning.
Working together and investing systematically in real trust
Real trust is needed if people are going to be fired up about a common task. That doesn’t mean just from one day to the next but when people work together side by side again and again. A long-term relationship between people is the secret of successful twinning projects.
In the world of global sourcing and hard competition, trying to get a partner exchange is often important for the buying centre in the project management landscape,where the specifications from purchasing and engineering often seem to be in conflict and project teams in the East and the West are polarised at the interfaces.
The attempt is often too great, when there are contracts to be awarded and perhaps a different partner could be used who is offering a better price or who is apparently a more obliging , more flexible partner.
We have had many discussions with customers, partners and project leaders from our automotive, toys, medical technology and industry sectors. And the tone is clear: everyone, who has already tried to run a new project from Germany in difficult and changing circumstances with a new partner e.g. in China, is familiar with the experience and nobody would like to repeat it.
Nobody is really to blame, but…
The project loses profitability, stress increases, reworking increases in magnitude, the timetable unravels. In the worst case scenario, neither the timetable, nor the cost plan nor the the quality requirements can actually be carried through completely. And this is using the best project management from home.
Nobody is really to blame, but the project unravels and you can’t get it back again. Losses are shared or “lost” in-house. Nobody is really satisfied. People understand the situation but have a bad feeling when they think about the next joint project. If there are subsequent projects, then there are opponents and naysayers on both sides right from the start of the project. Not a very happy starting point.
The secret of successful projects, which are able to access unhindered the sheer immeasurable capacity and competences of the Chinese markets, can be described in a couple of words, TWINNING is WINNING or – as we used to say in German “two hands catch the fly”. To do that, both hands must want to do it, they must be well practised in working together and they must be able to synchronise their skill.