Collaborative Construction Contracting & LEAN Project Delivery
Robust collaborative construction contracting and productive, on-demand LEAN project delivery is readily available in two forms; integrated project delivery (IPD), for major new construction, and Job Order Contracting (JOC), for repair, renovation, and minor new construction.
In both cases, real property owners, facilities managers, users, and their service providers ( contractors, architects, engineers) are integrated into a single performance-based contract based upon proven LEAN construction procurement and delivery methodology.
While some owners and service providers may not be ready to implement on-demand, on-time, and on-budget quality construction on on a consistent basis. For regulatory, cultural, or capability limitation, they are forced to continue the use of traditional procurement and project delivery methods. Methods such as design-bid-build, and even design-build, struggle with either being limited to lowest bidder, ad-hoc processes, or limited cooperation among all key participants and stakeholders. Thus, they are forced to continue their legacy of poor productivity, waste, and legal disputes.
In a small, but growing number of cased, public sector governance and even some non-governmental organizations are moving to completely restructure both their contractual frameworks and day-to-day activities in factor of significantly improved facilities repair, renovation, and construction outcomes.
While all implementations of IPD and JOC are not the same, fortunately all the tools and support services are available for owner and service providers that do their homeworks.
Virtually any real property owner, builder, engineer, or architect, can begin to explore and implement IPD and JOC and their associated LEAN workflows today. All that is needed, in addition to the right tools and support, is the appropriate threshold of leadership and capability.
Collaborative construction contracting and project delivery treats repair, renovation, and new construction as a ongoing process or program versus a single individual project. Focus is upon building long-term mutually relationships among complementary collaborative teams.
The fundamental premise to any LEAN construction procurement and delivery method is that both owners and service partners want the best possible outcome and that each party brings unique strengths and capabilities to the table. While there is clearly owner leadership and oversight, mutual trust and shared risk/reward enable local decision-making by those actually performing the work. The goods news and the bad news is… participants MUST hold these beliefs, and implement a number of simple but important collaborative practices, to achieve significantly better overall outcomes.
Fundamental aspects of LEAN collaborative construction…
- Best value procurement
- Financial transparency
- Common data environment (example-locally researched unit price book organized via CSI MasterFormat)
- Early and ongoing participation among all participants and stakeholders
- Shared risk/reward
- Mutual trust/respect
- Require initial and ongoing training for all
- Atmosphere support continuous improvement
- Supporting collaborative technology
- Clearly written collaborative multi-party, multi-year contract and inclusive operations manual/execution guide
While the vast majority relationships between real property owners and service providers are adversarial and fraught with competing interests, there is no reason that the situation can’t be changed.
- Get everyone involved in the project
- Contractors must have the expertise specific to the project, location, and be able to drive optimal outcomes
- Owners must demonstrate leadership and encourage… no require… specific behaviors that lead to better project outcomes
- Contractors must be allowed to earn a reasonable profit
- From concept through completion and beyond, collaborative, transparent must rule the day