Prof Martin Gill’s OSPAs thought leadership webinars are now in their fourth year. The 178th one, yesterday, was a classic. The format, as outlined by Martin at the outset, is to do a critique (not the same as criticism): to pick apart issues, to learn and work towards a better way of doing security. The topic for a panel of three, drawn as ever from across the English-speaking world, was how to optimise performances when managing security suppliers.
As ever, Martin invited each of the three – Alexander Masraff from France, Canadian consultant Michael White; and the deputy head of security at University College London, Oliver Curran – to give an opening statement. As ever, the mix of backgrounds of the three added to the discussion. Ollie has been in the security industry for 27 years; as he recalled, the first 12 working for suppliers, and the last 15 in-house. He divided up how to optimise performance (easy to say what to do, harder to do), into two: before and during the contract term.
Before, it’s imperative to have clear goals and SLAs (service level agreements) and to align interests, so that you understand each other’s strengths. The supplier shouldn’t over-sell themselves. The people responsible at the supplier for winning contracts are not necessarily the same ones managing the contracts.
A supplier can use the SLA to ensure that service levels are there, while the client has assurance that suppliers are committed to meeting needs, and expectations. Ollie also spoke of the need for clear communications; misunderstandings, to him, are the key to poor performance. Why does it go wrong? Because we are all human. A supplier may focus on what they can most easily supply, not necessarily what the client most needs. Ollie also spoke insightfully about when something goes wrong at the supplier’s end; he suggested that if the supplier tells the client, that will build trust.
It’s about relationships, he added. Good relationships are the cure; or, the disease. He wondered if business relationships are a lot like personal relationships, short or long-term. They’re exciting at the start, and you make promises to each other and want mutual trust, and you communicate well; and if problems arise, you ant them resolved quickly; if one partner messes up, you want a mutual solution.
“In this industry,” he went on, continuing the metaphor, “long term relationships are quite rare. We are probably not going to grow old together.” Don’t hate me, he added, when the relationship ends and the client leaves the supplier for one of their best friends. While business and personal relationships are not the same – in business, children aren’t involved – in security it is about people, Ollie went on. Clients such as UCL have large communities to protect.
Alexandre, too, has been on both sides of the fence, as an entrepreneur and customer. He went through five points. First, understanding the global environment. Do you, the customer, want a small or large supplier? Is it easy to find staff in the job market, and what kind of people? As he added, Paris is due to host the Olympic Games in 2024. As in London before the 2012 Olympics, “we all know that there won’t be enough security guards to meet the needs,” Alexandre said, “so we need to secure our staff now, so that they don’t run to the Olympic Games for a few months.”
Second, expectations – the customer should tell the supplier, who should not have to guess. Thirdly, echoing Ollie, Alexandre reminded the audience that security is about human beings; treat the supplier’s staff as much as possible as if they were part of the team and the solution. Fourth, ‘buy what you can afford’. If you can’t afford what you want, innovate; or make the decision-makers understand the risk (of not having what you can’t afford).
Last but not least, the supplier is in business to make money and if they don’t they will cut any middle management and you won’t be satisfied with the contractor.
As often in these webinars, the third and final panellist found themselves in agreement with the first two speakers. One word that came to Michael’s mind not mentioned so far was: education, that those on both sides of the table needed to be educated. As a consultant Michael acknowledged that it might be slightly self-serving to say, but bringing in a consultant to be the middle person, to have conversations with supplier and client, could help all round; for understanding of the market, the supplier’s capability.
Michael – again, someone with more than one perspective as someone who’s been on the front line and managed guarding and an alarm company – seconded Ollie’s point about communication and transparency; otherwise, you aren’t going to have a great relationship, and you are going to have a constant cycle of having to find new technology; or a new supplier.
Then came the discussion with questions from the audience. A theme that emerged was whether or how procurement is the villain, as a buying department that’s too powerful, that doesn’t understand security and under-cuts any good practice. While Oliver praised UCL’s procurement team, he agreed that bad practice could happen. Alexandre agreed: “We get what we pay for …. Paying a little bit more is less expensive than paying for the security breach consequences.”
Martin stayed with procurement (a topic he has studied wearing another hat, that of the Security Research Initiative, SRI). Is it reasonable, he asked, to ask procurement to understand something that they buy once every three or five years (like cleaning and other services)? Earlier Ollie had said it’s the duty of security to have conversations with procurement.
Michael asked if – as with a table-top exercise – if an individual makes a fault, is the mistake due to the individual or the organisation – because is the individual following instructions, and a process?
Ollie said something about the UCL contract, as featured in the February 2022 print edition of Professional Security Magazine. It’s big; 250-plus security officers. When Ollie goes through the tender with a few potential suppliers, to explain the risks around the (central London) university, ‘some just think it’s drunk students, traffic cones …. It’s a vast range [of issues and threats] and I often say to them, ‘you need to understand it’. You need to prove to me, do you understand the challenges at university.” As he implied, a guarding contractor that works on construction, retail and corporate may get that Ollie’s site is different, while to some contractors, it’s just another contract. Were a supplier to show that understanding, Ollie suggested, and they may get a long-term relationship, and the supplier will grow; ‘we want our suppliers to grow with us and do well. Absolutely. It makes them better, and gives us a better service.”
Martin Gill picked up that; that for a university, profit (for a supplier) is not a dirty word. Ollie confirmed, and Alexandre seconded. Martin then took a new tack; may the shortcoming rest not with the buyer but with the broader world of security management, that haven’t grown up with nor possess the skills of business (to ‘sell’ their point of view to their organisation).
Michael made a significant point, that you can hear elsewhere in contract guarding; that guard firms can and do walk away from offered work. “We fired clients,” Michael recalled from his guarding work, “because there was too much management hand-holding,” and the guard firm was spending more money than it could afford, “and we weren’t making a profit …. We fired a bunch of clients because there wasn’t that appreciation on both sides of the table [about pay rates].” He came up with a pithy phrase shortly after: “Often security is looked at as an invoice, not an asset.” That is to say, buyers ask what are they getting; as Ollie and Alexandre said, it’s for the client’s security manager as the one with the expertise to tell the procurement department how Security prevents incidents, and what it’s protecting.
As for how some security directors aren’t getting out into their organisations and doing so, Michael spoke of working with one of a thousand employees and finding employees that had no idea there was a security director; yet he had been there six years. While earlier it was suggested that the contractor might not want to admit to some fault, nor might the client’s security department, if there were a theft problem, for example.
As ever, the time ran out and still the debate was going strong, and may well lead to a further webinar.
About the OSPAs webinars
You can listen to past webinars at https://theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/. The next is on Thursday, January 26, about the UK’s and other countries’ business improvement districts (BIDs), as significant users of private security on-street.
Picture by Mark Rowe; UCL, home to the stuffed philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
