On the Collaboration Operating Model for Relational Contracting — and the Readiness Question the Defence Industrial Strategy Cannot Answer Alone
The posts in this series have documented what happens when readiness is validated before commitment is made — and what it costs when it isn’t. Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy has just made a $150B commitment. The readiness question is now urgent.
There is a particular satisfaction that comes with watching evidence finally catch up to a thesis.
For over two decades, Canada’s Ottawa-based Strategic Relationships Solutions (SRS) Inc., founded by Andy Akrouche, has been developing and refining a framework for what a high-performing strategic relationship actually looks like — not as a philosophical aspiration, but as a structured, measurable, replicable operating model. The first edition of Relationships First articulated it. The third and fourth editions refined it. Every engagement the SRS team has run since has tested and enhanced it.
And throughout that time, forward-thinking people inside PSPC, DND, and allied agencies have been quietly building toward the same destination — relationship charters, collaboration accords, and outcome-focused governance arrangements that reflect exactly the principles the evidence has consistently supported.
That convergence — between what the evidence has always shown and what institutional practice is now embracing — is what makes this moment significant.
The Government Finally Said It Out Loud
In February 2026, the Carney government launched Canada’s first Defence Industrial Strategy. The language it used to describe the new approach to defence procurement was striking — not because it was new, but because it was familiar. Strategic partnerships. Long-term capability relationships. Wisely moving from project-by-project procurement to outcome-based industrial ecosystems. Prioritising Canadian partners who can sustain capability over time, not just deliver against a statement of work.
That is the Collaboration Operating Model — the SRS COM — validated as federal policy.
The Defence Investment Agency represents an inflection point, not a starting point. It builds on the work that progressive leaders inside PSPC and DND have been advancing for years — the relationship charters, the collaboration accords, the structured engagement frameworks that have been quietly improving outcomes in complex programs. What the DIA does is move that work from the margins to the mandate. It gives institutional authority to what the evidence has been showing all along.
The market has caught up. The question is whether the institutions have the operating model to execute what they just committed to.
What the Collaboration Operating Model Actually Is
SRS’s Collaboration Operating Model (COM) for Relational Contracting is not a theory. It is a reference state — a description of what a high-performing strategic relationship looks like when it is working — built on five decades of combined field experience across defence, IT, infrastructure, and public-private partnerships. The COM operationalizes ISO 44001, the international standard for collaborative business relationships, making it practically applicable to the complex, multi-stakeholder environments that Canadian defence and infrastructure procurement requires.
The COM rests on five pillars: shared purpose rather than common goals, joint governance rather than compliance management, open-book commercial transparency rather than fixed-fee adversarialism, outcomes management rather than deliverable-by-deliverable oversight, and continuous realignment rather than static contract enforcement.
The distinction between shared purpose and common goals matters more than it might appear. A private sector firm and a government department do not have common goals — they cannot. But they can have a shared purpose: a mission for the relationship that both parties are genuinely committed to, and a vision of where the relationship can take them that neither could achieve independently. The COM provides the structural framework within which that shared purpose can be defined, governed, and evolved over time.
The Outcome Realization Factor framework — the ORF — is where the COM becomes operationally distinct from every other collaboration model in the market. Most organizations know what success looks like: an outcome statement, a KPI, a performance target. What they cannot answer is what must be true for that success to be achieved. The ORF addresses this directly. It is the enablement side of risk management — not what could go wrong, but what must go right. A risk register identifies threats and mitigation plans. An ORF register identifies enablers and implementation plans. Both are required. Most contracts contain only the former.
The healthcare example makes it concrete: if the outcome is improved access to care and the KPI is wait list length, the ORF answers the question of what must change in the system to move that number — increased physicians, additional capacity, technology investment, workflow redesign. Without the ORF, you have an outcome and a measurement but no mechanism to get there. With it, you have a plan that the relationship can be built around.
This is not a theoretical framework. It is how the successful implementations I have documented in 27 years of independent procurement research actually worked — from the 1998 Department of National Defence SR&ED-funded procurement diagnostic that took delivery performance from 51% to 97.3% in three months, to Virginia’s eVA program that generated $338 million in savings over 24 years, to every complex initiative that succeeded by treating readiness and governance as seriously as the technology or the contract.
The question now is what happens when the policy environment finally catches up to the model.
Where the COM Meets the Current Crisis
The Canadian government has committed to at least $150B in defence investment over the next two decades. The Defence Investment Agency is live. The language of strategic partnership is now official policy.
But here is what the policy announcement cannot do: it cannot create the conditions required to make strategic partnerships work. It cannot align the incentives of the programme teams, the industry partners, and the oversight bodies. It cannot establish the joint governance architecture that allows a prime partner to be held accountable for outcomes rather than deliverables. It cannot define the shared purpose that makes a 20-year capability relationship function rather than fracture.
Those conditions are ideally established at relationship creation — not discovered after the first contract cycle reveals they are missing.
The COM is that framework. The pathway to get there — the structured engagement model SRS has refined over thirty years — is how organizations get from where they are to where the policy now requires them to be.
The Readiness Question Nobody Is Asking
There is one more dimension to this that the policy documents do not address, and that the procurement reform conversation consistently avoids.
Saying that Canada will move from transactions to strategic partnerships is not the same as being ready to do so. The readiness required to sustain a strategic partnership — aligned incentives across stakeholder groups, shared governance architecture, genuine outcome accountability, the relational capacity to navigate conflict without reverting to contract enforcement — is not present in most procurement environments. It has to be built, tested, and validated before the relationship is committed to.
I have spent 27 years documenting what happens when that validation is skipped. The failure rate across every major technology and procurement initiative since 1998 has held at approximately 80%. The common thread is not technology selection, vendor quality, or budget adequacy. It is the absence of trust through strong, effective, measurable and sustainable business relationships — and the pre-commitment failure to assess whether the structural prerequisites for that trust exist before the commitment is made.
The COM describes where you need to be and how to get there. It includes a readiness diagnostic that tells you whether you are there yet — and if not, what needs to change before you proceed — and that diagnostic has to exist before the commitment is made, not after the outcome reveals it was missing. When it doesn’t, the same diagnostic becomes the only way to understand why the initiative is failing — and whether it can still be recovered.
That sequence — COM as destination, readiness as prerequisite — is the complete picture. Canada now has the policy mandate and the funding. What it needs is the collaboration operating model with the discipline to validate readiness before billions of dollars starts moving.
A Note on Timing
The evidence behind the COM has been consistent since the late 1990s. The Collaboration Operating Model SRS built has been tested across defence, infrastructure, IT outsourcing, and public-private partnerships in Canada and internationally. It has been refined across three editions. It operationalizes ISO 44001 in practice. It has been presented to 150 DND professionals at a single session and is currently the basis of proposals before the Defence Investment Agency itself.
That work did not happen in a vacuum. It happened because people inside PSPC, DND, and allied agencies were willing to engage with a different way of thinking about complex relationships — to move from managing contracts to managing outcomes, from measuring compliance to measuring shared results. The relationship charters and collaboration accords already in place are evidence of that commitment. The DIA is where it reaches full institutional expression.
The question is not whether the evidence supports the COM. Thirty years of field evidence, and the international standard that codifies it, answers that.
The question is whether the infrastructure now being built — the DIA, the Defence Industrial Strategy, the shift to capability-based partnerships — will be grounded in the operating model the evidence has always pointed to, before the strategic relationships it requires are signed.
Jon Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and Procurement Insights — 27 years, 3,300+ documents, zero vendor sponsorships. A long-time associate of SRS and a contributing voice to the Relational Contracting Model, he has worked with this approach since the original publication of Relationships First: The New Relationship Paradigm in Contracting. For more information on Phase 0™ Diagnostics, visit hansenprocurement.com.
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Procurement Insights
Thirty Years to Get Here. The Opportunity to Use It.
Posted on April 18, 2026
0
On the Collaboration Operating Model for Relational Contracting — and the Readiness Question the Defence Industrial Strategy Cannot Answer Alone
The posts in this series have documented what happens when readiness is validated before commitment is made — and what it costs when it isn’t. Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy has just made a $150B commitment. The readiness question is now urgent.
There is a particular satisfaction that comes with watching evidence finally catch up to a thesis.
For over two decades, Canada’s Ottawa-based Strategic Relationships Solutions (SRS) Inc., founded by Andy Akrouche, has been developing and refining a framework for what a high-performing strategic relationship actually looks like — not as a philosophical aspiration, but as a structured, measurable, replicable operating model. The first edition of Relationships First articulated it. The third and fourth editions refined it. Every engagement the SRS team has run since has tested and enhanced it.
And throughout that time, forward-thinking people inside PSPC, DND, and allied agencies have been quietly building toward the same destination — relationship charters, collaboration accords, and outcome-focused governance arrangements that reflect exactly the principles the evidence has consistently supported.
That convergence — between what the evidence has always shown and what institutional practice is now embracing — is what makes this moment significant.
The Government Finally Said It Out Loud
In February 2026, the Carney government launched Canada’s first Defence Industrial Strategy. The language it used to describe the new approach to defence procurement was striking — not because it was new, but because it was familiar. Strategic partnerships. Long-term capability relationships. Wisely moving from project-by-project procurement to outcome-based industrial ecosystems. Prioritising Canadian partners who can sustain capability over time, not just deliver against a statement of work.
That is the Collaboration Operating Model — the SRS COM — validated as federal policy.
The Defence Investment Agency represents an inflection point, not a starting point. It builds on the work that progressive leaders inside PSPC and DND have been advancing for years — the relationship charters, the collaboration accords, the structured engagement frameworks that have been quietly improving outcomes in complex programs. What the DIA does is move that work from the margins to the mandate. It gives institutional authority to what the evidence has been showing all along.
The market has caught up. The question is whether the institutions have the operating model to execute what they just committed to.
What the Collaboration Operating Model Actually Is
SRS’s Collaboration Operating Model (COM) for Relational Contracting is not a theory. It is a reference state — a description of what a high-performing strategic relationship looks like when it is working — built on five decades of combined field experience across defence, IT, infrastructure, and public-private partnerships. The COM operationalizes ISO 44001, the international standard for collaborative business relationships, making it practically applicable to the complex, multi-stakeholder environments that Canadian defence and infrastructure procurement requires.
The COM rests on five pillars: shared purpose rather than common goals, joint governance rather than compliance management, open-book commercial transparency rather than fixed-fee adversarialism, outcomes management rather than deliverable-by-deliverable oversight, and continuous realignment rather than static contract enforcement.
The distinction between shared purpose and common goals matters more than it might appear. A private sector firm and a government department do not have common goals — they cannot. But they can have a shared purpose: a mission for the relationship that both parties are genuinely committed to, and a vision of where the relationship can take them that neither could achieve independently. The COM provides the structural framework within which that shared purpose can be defined, governed, and evolved over time.
The Outcome Realization Factor framework — the ORF — is where the COM becomes operationally distinct from every other collaboration model in the market. Most organizations know what success looks like: an outcome statement, a KPI, a performance target. What they cannot answer is what must be true for that success to be achieved. The ORF addresses this directly. It is the enablement side of risk management — not what could go wrong, but what must go right. A risk register identifies threats and mitigation plans. An ORF register identifies enablers and implementation plans. Both are required. Most contracts contain only the former.
The healthcare example makes it concrete: if the outcome is improved access to care and the KPI is wait list length, the ORF answers the question of what must change in the system to move that number — increased physicians, additional capacity, technology investment, workflow redesign. Without the ORF, you have an outcome and a measurement but no mechanism to get there. With it, you have a plan that the relationship can be built around.
This is not a theoretical framework. It is how the successful implementations I have documented in 27 years of independent procurement research actually worked — from the 1998 Department of National Defence SR&ED-funded procurement diagnostic that took delivery performance from 51% to 97.3% in three months, to Virginia’s eVA program that generated $338 million in savings over 24 years, to every complex initiative that succeeded by treating readiness and governance as seriously as the technology or the contract.
The question now is what happens when the policy environment finally catches up to the model.
Where the COM Meets the Current Crisis
The Canadian government has committed to at least $150B in defence investment over the next two decades. The Defence Investment Agency is live. The language of strategic partnership is now official policy.
But here is what the policy announcement cannot do: it cannot create the conditions required to make strategic partnerships work. It cannot align the incentives of the programme teams, the industry partners, and the oversight bodies. It cannot establish the joint governance architecture that allows a prime partner to be held accountable for outcomes rather than deliverables. It cannot define the shared purpose that makes a 20-year capability relationship function rather than fracture.
Those conditions are ideally established at relationship creation — not discovered after the first contract cycle reveals they are missing.
The COM is that framework. The pathway to get there — the structured engagement model SRS has refined over thirty years — is how organizations get from where they are to where the policy now requires them to be.
The Readiness Question Nobody Is Asking
There is one more dimension to this that the policy documents do not address, and that the procurement reform conversation consistently avoids.
Saying that Canada will move from transactions to strategic partnerships is not the same as being ready to do so. The readiness required to sustain a strategic partnership — aligned incentives across stakeholder groups, shared governance architecture, genuine outcome accountability, the relational capacity to navigate conflict without reverting to contract enforcement — is not present in most procurement environments. It has to be built, tested, and validated before the relationship is committed to.
I have spent 27 years documenting what happens when that validation is skipped. The failure rate across every major technology and procurement initiative since 1998 has held at approximately 80%. The common thread is not technology selection, vendor quality, or budget adequacy. It is the absence of trust through strong, effective, measurable and sustainable business relationships — and the pre-commitment failure to assess whether the structural prerequisites for that trust exist before the commitment is made.
The COM describes where you need to be and how to get there. It includes a readiness diagnostic that tells you whether you are there yet — and if not, what needs to change before you proceed — and that diagnostic has to exist before the commitment is made, not after the outcome reveals it was missing. When it doesn’t, the same diagnostic becomes the only way to understand why the initiative is failing — and whether it can still be recovered.
That sequence — COM as destination, readiness as prerequisite — is the complete picture. Canada now has the policy mandate and the funding. What it needs is the collaboration operating model with the discipline to validate readiness before billions of dollars starts moving.
A Note on Timing
The evidence behind the COM has been consistent since the late 1990s. The Collaboration Operating Model SRS built has been tested across defence, infrastructure, IT outsourcing, and public-private partnerships in Canada and internationally. It has been refined across three editions. It operationalizes ISO 44001 in practice. It has been presented to 150 DND professionals at a single session and is currently the basis of proposals before the Defence Investment Agency itself.
That work did not happen in a vacuum. It happened because people inside PSPC, DND, and allied agencies were willing to engage with a different way of thinking about complex relationships — to move from managing contracts to managing outcomes, from measuring compliance to measuring shared results. The relationship charters and collaboration accords already in place are evidence of that commitment. The DIA is where it reaches full institutional expression.
The question is not whether the evidence supports the COM. Thirty years of field evidence, and the international standard that codifies it, answers that.
The question is whether the infrastructure now being built — the DIA, the Defence Industrial Strategy, the shift to capability-based partnerships — will be grounded in the operating model the evidence has always pointed to, before the strategic relationships it requires are signed.
Jon Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and Procurement Insights — 27 years, 3,300+ documents, zero vendor sponsorships. A long-time associate of SRS and a contributing voice to the Relational Contracting Model, he has worked with this approach since the original publication of Relationships First: The New Relationship Paradigm in Contracting. For more information on Phase 0™ Diagnostics, visit hansenprocurement.com.
-30-
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