Drivers & Enablers for Collaboration in Construction

Clients Leadership

The interview findings showed that client’s leadership pushes some key factors that could support collaborative working relationships and project team performance. This influence

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Page 158 could also stimulate other construction practitioners to support innovation in the construction industry. For instance, some of the respondents interviewed stated that:

‘’Why collaboration and its adoption keep stalling in the industry, is because nobody wants to trust or blink first, it certainly need momentous effort from clients putting heads together to get high-level support’’ [SQs01]. ‘’This will require identifying who can change, and this need strong leadership from clients, stakeholders and eventually it will get to the ones that are resisting the change, it also need transparency, right ethical behaviours, understanding each other’s ambition to align interests – and certainly client’s needs to lead this ambition.’’ [LP01].

This means that clients can intervene and support collaborative practices, specifically when it comes down to commercial relationships, which seems to be lacking within the construction landscape. This has the potential to allow cross-functional interactions and better understanding of project value and optimization across boundaries. Although, it can be argued that clients themselves are hesitant when it comes to collaborative practices because of the sector dynamics (short-term focus). Thus, owners are reluctant to commit, they often opt to stick with what has worked before. However, their intervention could transform commercial thinking; potentially decrease the transactional characteristics that surrounds project delivery approach (Farmer, 2016).

Early Contractor Involvement (ECI)

The interview analyzed revealed that engaging contractors early not only would improve collaboration, but also could enhance early costing interactions.

‘’Involving contractor early helps us to sit closely to influence design and its changes’’ [CD02]. ‘’With teams integrated early, man-marking jobs could be reduced, eliminating massive amount of wastes in our processes’’ [LP02]. This indicates that early collaboration has the capacity to strengthen not only conceptual processes, but also the roles played by commercial actors. However, this need integrated team-involving client, contractor, designers, and supply chain group away from the customary approach, where it involves several teams each having their own estimators/QSs validating and replicating similar tasks. Establishing this arrangement could provide the platform for QSs to relate with contractors and other stakeholders thus, developed cost plans and estimates jointly (Rahman and Alhassan, 2012). Whilst this exploit is not new in collaborative setting, it simply showed that when the right people

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Page 159 are assembled early, the integrated team would be able to improve efficiency, accordingly, eliminate unnecessary waste during pre-contract stages. However, this approach rarely happens in practice, as evidently QSs are still contracted traditionally within the prevailing model. In fact, most stakeholders are brought in at different times, and this continued to affect how parties adapt in collaborative practices.

Shared Risk/Reward & Relational Contracting

Most of the respondents interviewed observed that the use of what is best described, as ‘relational contract’ to inspire early collaboration in practice remain substantial. This arrangement focus on developing long-term relationships among the project parties. More importantly here, consultants such as QSs needs to be involved with opportunity to work closely with the client and contractors over time. Some of the respondents lamented that:

‘’The arrangement here is not created through traditional or D&B, its relational and it facilitate early collaboration and involvement of contractor & consultants’’ [LP03]. ‘An example of it would be the procure 21, which is very much collaborative, QSs work as cost managers, the contractor is very much involve early, as well as the architects developing an indicative high level design, they work together to develop the cost plans for the project. Once concept designs and elemental cost estimates are prepared, contractor is brought into the design for cost development process to assist in value engineering of design and production drawings’’ [CD01].

Again, this reiterates why early collaboration of project stakeholders is important. This also characterizes the essence of ‘costing collaboratively’ where trade contractor looks ‘over the shoulder’ of the specialist designer to provide concurrent cost and buildability advice as the work is designed, detailed and finalised. In fact, this is where the idea of CC needs to be reinforced, allowing cross-functional integration (including QSs) to link with the value stream. Potentially, this arrangement would also support to maintain long-term relationship, ensuring repeated workload and efficiency, but consequently, this would mean less work for QSs and construction lawyers who continue to influence contractual arrangements (Pasquire et al., 2015).

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Page 160 Figure 5-3: Drivers & Enablers for Collaboration in Practices

Furthermore, some of the participants interviewed are of the view that adopting pain- share/gain-share mechanism could also be one of the better ways to break down the siloed boundaries during early costing activities, to achieve true collaboration in the process. Although, the approach focuses more on building long-term relationships, open-book estimating and shared objectives. The respondents connoted on this saying:

‘’We use the pain/gain strategy right from the start with the key teams involved, it is an open practice and it reinforces target costing approach’’ [CD01]. ‘’ What happen traditionally is that bill of quantities is used to measure things and transfer risk to other parties, in this system, we measure and have discussion on how we’re going to do the work and how to build it’’ [LP01].

The importance of transparency and shared accountability cannot be overemphasized here. This also marched with Sunil et al., (2011) that emphasized on trust and shared accountability as the key components required to reinforce CW. This would also enhance the developmental process of costing and design, where the business case is largely validated by the team to achieve the client end-goal (Ballard, 2011).

Upfront Investment/Collaboration

Collaborating over costing has been described in this study as not only the approach to develop project costs timely, but also the opportunity to understand flow efficiency and value creation during costing interactions, which is highly lacking in the prevailing model. One of the respondent interviewed agreed that industry wide collaboration in this

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Page 161 manner would be beneficial to clients and the practitioners in involved. The participant further connoted that:

‘’ We sometimes collaborate with stakeholders during costing to validate our design and costs targets, in doing that we build optimal relationships and we understand each other’s ambitions and purposes’’ [PM02].

Again, this showed that to be able to participate or engage in cross-functional integration, all stakeholders including those that are not signatory to the contracts (QSs, consultants, lawyers etc.) must interact and respect each other’s ambition – thus, work toward a common goal. Nonetheless, owners need to lead this ambition.