The first six to twelve months decide whether the next three years run smoothly or painfully. Here is where the effort should go.
People talk about frameworks as if they are just a longer contract. They are not. A framework is a relationship. The client is partnering with you for three years or more, and in that time you are not delivering a single project. You are managing a whole portfolio of assets and a set of requirements that changes day to day, including emergencies and short-notice jobs that have to be dealt with as they arise.
Get the start wrong and it can be a painful three years. Get it right and it runs. The mistake I see is treating the early months as business as usual. In reality, you should put a lot of effort into the first six to twelve months, because that is when you smooth everything out. In a perfect world, you would understand everything the client needs, every issue they have had and every lesson they have learned over the years, on day one. That does not transfer across in reality. The only things that come through cleanly tend to be the big, high-level lessons, because those are the ones nobody forgets. It is the small-scale ones, the ones that actually make the contract run smoothly, that get lost, and you only recover them by talking regularly.
That means regular, periodic meetings, monthly where it helps, not just away days and a KPI report telling you what you hit and what you missed. And I would push back on the KPIs themselves. In many frameworks, particularly in social housing, they are built around turning properties around: getting a void re-tenanted quickly so it is not sitting empty, or making sure a tenant is not decanted for too long. That matters, but it is not the whole picture. There is no reason safety and quality should not be built into the KPIs alongside turnaround. A framework measured only on speed is measuring only half the job.
The open, continuous flow of information is what holds it all together. Keep the round table going, keep talking, and the small lessons that make a framework work surface early instead of a year too late. That is the difference between three good years and three hard ones.
