The Missing Piece: How Cities Drive Change with Industry Partnerships

Cities are constantly evolving, tackling new challenges in infrastructure, technology, and sustainability while balancing limited budgets, increasing service demands, and regulatory complexities. Municipal teams often know what needs to be done, but resource constraints, siloed operations, and competing priorities can slow execution.

One approach is collaborating with the private sector to complement municipal resources. These partnerships create opportunities to introduce new technology, accelerate project timelines, and improve service delivery in ways that might otherwise take months or even years through traditional government processes.

Beyond the Outsourcing Misconception: Getting Things Done

Bringing in consultants or industry expertise is sometimes negatively perceived as shifting work outside the organization, but in many cases, it provides specialized knowledge and additional capacity that help internal teams execute projects more effectively.

Just within our own network, we collaborate with experts across multiple disciplines, including a consultant with a Ph.D. in Structural and Earthquake Engineering, a Fractional CFO, Employee Union Specialists, and Law Enforcement Consultants—each bringing valuable insights without cities needing to source and commit as full-time hires. These professionals have multi-disciplinary backgrounds, bridging their expertise with process and technology improvement—accelerating decision-making, and support municipal teams in delivering results efficiently.

The goal isn’t to replace staff—it’s to bring in the right mix of expertise to keep projects moving forward while ensuring skilled city forces are deployed where they’re needed most.

Take a recent example: In an end-to-end process we’re designing for a civic project team deploying advanced timelapse cameras. We identified internal city electricians as the best resource for handling installations—rather than outsourcing the work to external contractors. Additionally, we’ve drafted long-term process requirements to integrate these deployments into the city’s enterprise IT system for self-serve requests and procurement.

Prior to this assessment, city staff were fully outsourcing the project to general contractors. However, our approach ensures that work remains within the organization, equipping city teams with the tools and workflows to manage future deployments themselves. These internal resources already exist, but they’re often overlooked simply because different departments aren’t always aware of what’s available to them.

By redesigning processes to retain work within municipal teams, cities can increase efficiency, reduce unnecessary costs, and create new opportunities for public employees—all without sacrificing innovation or delaying projects.

What About the Cost of Consultants?

It’s a fair question—hiring experts can sometimes command a premium. However, with the right consulting partner, the cost-benefit of on-demand expertise far outweighs the long-term costs of sourcing, hiring, and sustaining full-time staff for specialized roles.

Rather than committing to permanent hires for niche skills, your consulting partner teams can assemble a dynamic group of specialists focused solely on rapidly delivering results. These experts operate with high-performance metrics and accountability, ensuring that projects move efficiently while reducing the risks of slow execution, resource gaps, or prolonged hiring cycles.

Additionally, with many municipalities facing headcount caps and constrained budgets, leveraging external experts allows funding to be better allocated toward day-to-day operational staff who provide essential city services. This balance ensures that cities have the right mix of long-term functional resources while still accessing specialized expertise when needed.

By using consultants strategically, cities gain immediate access to top-tier expertise without long-term overhead costs, allowing them to adapt, innovate, and execute with agility.

Why Partnering with Industry Works

When structured effectively, these collaborations provide cities with several key advantages:

• Faster project execution – Many city initiatives stall due to capacity constraints rather than a lack of knowledge. Working with external partners allows municipalities to tap into additional resources and move from planning to implementation more efficiently.

• Access to specialized expertise – Certain projects require niche skill sets or advanced technology that may not be available in-house. These partnerships connect municipalities with industry experts, technology providers, and specialized consultants to fill those gaps.

• Bringing innovation to the table – The private sector plays a major role in driving new technology and process improvements. By working together, cities can pilot, test, and refine solutions before making long-term investments.

• Shared risk and responsibility – A well-structured partnership ensures that both public and private stakeholders share accountability, leading to financially sustainable and resilient solutions that align with community needs and timelines.

• "Try before you buy" – One of the biggest advantages of partnering with industry firms like HammerSense is the ability to test and validate solutions before committing to large-scale procurement processes.

Government and public sector organizations often face lengthy and complex bid and tender requirements when sourcing new technologies or services. While necessary for major investments, these processes can slow innovation and make it difficult to explore emerging solutions.

By working with a pre-qualified vendor like HammerSense, municipalities can bypass the administrative burden of RFPs, RFQs, and extended procurement cycles—instead, quickly leveraging proof-of-concepts, industry knowledge, and feasibility studies to make informed decisions.

With deep industry connections, HammerSense can rapidly inquire within its network, access trial programs, and test solutions in a controlled environment. This sandbox approach enables municipalities to experiment, assess feasibility, and refine their strategies before making long-term commitments, ensuring that when they do invest, they do so with precise recommendations and real-world validation.

The Takeaway

Collaboration between municipalities and private organizations isn’t just about outsourcing—it’s about making the best use of taxpayer money to create smarter, more sustainable solutions in a time-efficient manner that better addresses community needs.