Best value—motivational focus is on value not lowest cost. Value is expressed in KRAs and KPIs that are linked to the project purpose. Often, 3BL issues are of high priority in such cases.

Emergency recovery—motivation drives a procurement solution that enables recovery from the emergency as quickly and as feasibly as possible.

Experimental—motivation drives purposeful exploration of options and the ability to learn and reflect upon experience to accumulate valuable knowledge that advances project objectives.

Competitive resource availability environment—motivation drives a sustainable response to the prevailing competitive environment. Economically buoyant times pose a challenge to POs losing key staff to other employers. In challenging economic times, POs could be obliged by their governments to take advantage of their market position to force project delivery teams to accept contract conditions that may be in the PO's short term but not long term interests. Both conditions impose pressures related to economic times.

Relational rationale—motivation and context drives the underlying logic of forming and developing relationships with potential project team members to further a longer term interest. Often all parties can benefit from the relationship, perhaps due to high levels of turbulence and change that challenge a BAU approach.

Known risks—motivation can be triggered by the PO/POR assessing that a particular procurement form appears most appropriate to respond to risk sharing and responsibility that are known, assessable and best managed by the relevant identified participant to be allocated responsibility for those risks.

Unknown risks—motivation is rooted in a context in which uncertainty requires a response of nurturing deep collaboration and trust between parties within a no-blame environment. There is a need for a psychologically safe environment where all participants can experiment with new approaches to respond to uncertainly and extreme ambiguity using teams with the capacity to rapidly evaluate consequences and outcomes and respond accordingly.

Governance processes—common assumptions and ways of working influences project governance processes and rules. These will vary according to the project procurement delivery form but will be designed to align the strategy, objectives and aims of the project. Process clarity is essential to inform the required behaviours.

Governance structure—the structure of the entire project team defines how the level of flexibility/rigidity, power and influence and communication symmetry directly influences the workplace culture. The way that a project's overall leadership and management team is constituted impacts upon who has a voice and how they can express ideas, perspectives and concerns.

Governance best value strategy through KRAs and KPIs—the project output and outcome is influenced by the strategy deployed to define, measure and assess success. The way that these are developed and used impacts upon effective project governance.

Risk-sharing conversation—The conversation about risk sharing; who takes responsibility for any class of, or particular risk. The strategy needs to be coherent to ensure that those best able to manage risk do so in a way that aligns the risk strategy to the project objectives and aims. The nature of these conversations differs in emphasis placed upon means to allocate accountability across project procurement forms.

Risk mitigation actions—there are a number of ways, ranging from collective to individual, to agree upon and decide how to mitigate risk that vary according to the procurement form.

System integration—of the project is structured and managed to provide a platform that is based upon the participant's philosophical stance about relationships between teams. Systems can be integrated to cope with risk, uncertainty and ambiguity to respond to a need for a platform to be developed to address these three related but separate concepts.

Common processes and systems—Project participants need to share a common way of working and a common language and communication approach to avoid misunderstanding that can undermine trust and commitment and consequently undermine effective decision making and action. Bridges and interoperability between systems to cope with a lack of a “one system” are also essential.

Integrated communication platform—A common ICT platform, including for example common BIM tools can minimise the risk of poor coordination, communication, and misunderstandings between participants

Hierarchal integration mechanisms—Leaders can inspire motivation toward unity of purpose by physically interacting with individuals in the various levels of an organisation. Site visits, meetings held on site, and other ritualistic or practical events that are held in the actual workplace can be very important as a platform for integrated joint action.

Physical co-location—Project participants can more easily communicate and interact on problem solving, monitoring, and active collaboration when they are in within easy reach of each other. Co-location in a well-considered and conducive environment can facilitate positive interaction.

Authentic leadership is present in designated project leaders who hold institutional or organisational power, but it also applies to ‘followers’ within a collective leadership sense.

Reflectiveness—Project participants are systems thinkers and often follow a strategic thinking approach about the situational context and know that the situational context is crucial to effective decision making.

Pragmatism—Project participants get on with the job, are politically astute, and work within constraints or find ethical and sensible ways around these constraints.

Appreciativeness—Project participants understand the motivations and value proposition of influential stakeholders involved in the project. They are consciously engaged with their team members and exhibit signs of having a high emotional intelligence.

Resilience—Project participants exhibit adaptability, versatility, flexibility and being persistent when faced with adversity. They are able to effectively learn from experience.

Wisdom—Project participants have opinions and advice that is valued, consistent, and reliable that others instinctively refer to. Their judgement abilities make their brokering advice crucial. They are perceived as having high levels of integrity based on inner strength of character, knowledge, and experience.

Spirit—Project participants demonstrate the courage and have sufficient influence and respect to effectively challenge assumptions and often offer radical alternative solutions to resolve complex and difficult situations.

Authenticity—Project participants demonstrate qualities of being approachable and trustworthy and open to ideas. They encourage and advance collaboration, discussion and new ways of thinking.

Autonomy—Project participants have autonomy to respond to the situational context. Their responsiveness is complicated by institutional and cultural norms that may either restrain their autonomy and therefore their capacity to respond to new initiatives and changes to “plan,” or the organisational culture and governance arrangements may leave them with enough autonomy to act somewhat independently.

Forms of trust—Project participants’ capacity to experiment, explore options and take action is advanced or constrained by their leadership teams’ perceptions of how various interests are best served. These perceptions are influenced by the nature of that interest, the forms and basis of project participants’ and their leaders’ level of trust in each other and understanding the impact of assumptions about self-interest and shared interest on trust their levels.

Safe workplace cultures—Project participants’ trust in their leaders and colleagues is often mediated by their perceived treatment in terms of a working in a safe psychological, physical, and intellectual environment.

Trust relationship building—Project participants and their leadership teams engage in varying levels of effort to create a balance in trust and control in which trust with caution is tempered with blind faith.

Innovation types—Project participants need to understand and adapt to behavioural expectations associated with different types of project procurement forms. They may be engaged in product, process, or behavioural types of innovation within a project or programme situational context that could affect how team member's commitment can be initiated and sustained. Balancing exploration and exploitation of innovation, given the procurement form expectation, is important.

Commitment to continuous improvement—Project participants’ purpose for being innovative should be to achieve continuous improvement. The extent to which project participants can be innovative and effect continuous improvement depends upon institutional, governance, and individual motivational and enabling factors.

Testing, prototyping and experimenting—Project participants’ innovative actions are usually manifested by testing, prototyping, and experimentation within the context of having and inquiring, curious, and often sceptical mind.

Alignment of common goals—Project participants’ need to be effectively collaborating to a constructive end through sharing common and aligned goals about best-for-project outcomes and how that delivers VfM.

Outcomes and performance levels—These should be assessed and judged based upon common best-for-project aligned goals.

Challenging for excellence—Project participants’ need to be constantly challenging their level of outcome and performance through effective collaboration toward a constructive evaluation of achieved outcomes and performance.

Value for money reporting—Project participants’ need to devise ways to recognise, monitor, and effectively diffuse knowledge about how their performance and workplace culture has impacted VfM on their project or programme. This is not about “spin-doctoring” but about making a credible and acceptable case for recognising achievements.

Recruiting support—Project participants’ need to devise ways to effectively recruit support for best-for-project values through an effective PO/POR internal and NOPs recruitment strategy as well as enlisting support for as many members of the project delivery chain as is possible.

Rationale for a no-blame culture—Project participants avoiding a blame-shifting culture having felt pain and hardship through past experience of being blamed. They are determined not to repeat the experience and to thus support a no-blame culture.

Facilitating mechanisms for no-blame—contractual, behavioural and organisational mechanisms that support the establishment and maintenance of a no-blame culture.

Cultural drivers—the discussion in Chapter 4 on culture highlighted that some cultures have high-power asymmetry, where it is expected that individuals at higher levels of a hierarchy make decisions and issue orders to those lower in the hierarchy who must accept and act on those decisions. Other cultural dimensions also impact power asymmetry. Uncertainty avoidance leads people to avoid being committed to a risky decision and a collectivist culture encourages, if not requires, that individuals “go along with the crowd” rather than voice concern or opposition to mooted decisions. Some disciplines and workplace settings demand challenges to assumptions, while others demand obedience and discipline. These cultural drivers enhance or impede genuine consensus decision making.

Enablers of consensus—organisational, structural, as well as behavioural enablers that facilitate and support consensus decision making and action taking.

Inhibitors of consensus—organisational structural as well as behavioural enablers that inhibit and suppress consensus decision making and action taking.

Lessons-learnt knowledge transfer—participants should be aware of the mechanisms that projects offer for opportunities for learning. They should be aware of the PO's learning and continuous improvement preferences and needs, how other team members operate, and how to best collaborate with them to learn from the project and to gain technical, process, or interpersonal knowledge. Some projects are specifically established as learning laboratories for radical new innovation or for more methodical incremental improvement. A focus on effective lessons-learnt knowledge transfer needs to be designed into a procurement form to avoid lessons learnt becoming lessons forgotten or ignored.

Capacity to adapt to new ideas—participants need to facilitate continuous improvement by prompting learning-oriented ways of thinking and doing. Knowledge transfer, as discussed in Chapter 4 Table 4, is difficult because knowledge is sticky. People who can make the most from continuous improvement are open to the process of “unlearning” and “relearning.” Without this adaptive capacity, lessons learnt become lessons ignored, and often context is not considered to wisely consider which lessons should be adopted or adapted depending on the way that the new context emerges.

A culture of skills and learning development—participants need to be developing a culture of organisational and individual learning to facilitate lessons-learnt knowledge transfer and provide the environment in which this can effectively take place. This goes beyond training and development at the technical and process level. It also entails enabling participants to perceive and understand context and situation and interconnectedness of elements into a whole so that cause and effect links can be understood to enable intelligent adaptation of lessons learnt.

Incentive arrangements—Project participants are incentivised to perform at exceptional levels of performance and there is a risk/reward system in place to encourage this. Central to incentive arrangements is developing systematic encouragement for innovation and for benefits of that innovation to be transferred to project participants and then onto their base organisations. Clear KRAs and KPIs are developed to monitor and measure performance.

Managing tension between innovation and incentivisation—participants and project owners need to manage the tension between continuous improvements that keeps raising the performance benchmark and how that is incentivised. It is important to balance providing sufficient incentive and reward for improvement, while avoiding incentive targets being either too easy or too hard, as this may undermine continuous improvement. This also brings in issues about balancing innovation incentivised through a competitive dialogue approach at the front-end of a project before contracts are let, with achieving innovation and improvement by encouraging innovation and continuous improvement progressively throughout the project duration.

Action-learning—participants as individuals, but more so in groups, undertake action-learning in a number of ways. These range from simply trying out things and experimenting to undertaking complicated modelling and simulation exercises. These activities provide the mechanisms to gain knowledge from action. It remains critical that mechanisms should be in place to capture and make usable, experience, and knowledge gained from action-learning initiatives.

Coaching and mentoring—another form of pragmatic learning is through coaching and mentoring. This is where experience and insights are shared in a formalised manner through one-on-one interaction between project participants and “wiser” or at least more experienced people who can help their coachees/mentees to be able to contextualise learning, to refine it through dialogue, and to add value through that knowledge by sharing stories making critical comparisons and exploring meaning and making sense out of that learning.

Transparency—the extent to which project participants agree to be fully open about their cost structures, their decision-making process, and their project delivery processes.

Accountability—the extent to which project participants agree to be fully open to scrutiny, allowing authorised project owner representatives to audit and inspect books, processes, and decision-making rationale.

Characteristics of mutual dependency—various forms of RBP have specific unique characteristics that have a focus on mutual team dependency where they sink or swim together. Teams may or may not perceive themselves to become a temporary single team entity with perceptions about how participants perceive the workplace supports or inhibits a unified team approach to managing the project.

Enhancing enablers of mutual dependency—participants seek to actively leverage processes, routines, and means to facilitate and sustain collaboration.

Countering inhibitors to mutual dependency—participants seek to actively counter processes, routines, and means that inhibit and undermine collaboration.

Best value means more than value for money (VfM). The narrow view of project delivery success expectations based upon the “iron triangle” of cost/time/fitness for purpose has expanded considerably. Transactionally oriented project procurement forms mainly focus on iron triangle interpretation more rigidly and narrowly to lowest cost and shortest time (bid) and quality or fitness for the purpose of meeting immediate needs. Higher levels of RBP approaches focus more on longer term strategic success. VfM can obtain what the POR asked for but not necessarily what the PO needed or wanted. Higher-order RBP often seeks greater effort and emphasis being placed upon the purpose of the project being clear. We see more thought being placed upon coherence in strategy, sustainability, “bigger picture” view of the project outcome, and, increasingly, social responsibility and 3BL considerations.

• Understanding that bid price/time/quality and final cost/time/quality are usually two very different outcomes.
• Understanding that output and outcome are also often loosely linked.
• Understanding that defining the meaning of value within a context of multiple valid stakeholder interests requires considerable sophistication and wisdom from the POR side and that collaborating with project delivery terms to realise that articulated value requires considerable sophistication and wisdom from the delivery team side through a constructive dialogue to differentiate between what was asked for and what was needed.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels are required regardless of the project procurement form. Projects characterised by a high levels of known-knowns and known-unknowns (see Chapter 3, Figure 11) may be delivered with a greater level of prescriptiveness and hierarchical “command and control” PM style. Projects characterised by a high level of unknown-knowns and unknown-unknowns (see Chapter 3, Figure 11) may require great levels of flexibility, ambidexterity, stakeholder engagement, openness to new ideas, and perspective taking of both the POR and project delivery team to be capable and effective in collaboration when exploring the viability of best value options.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels are required when initially defining and drafting as well as responding to the business case assumptions through project delivery. The main difference in business solutions KSAE requirements between the orders of project collaboration models is the manner in which these are applied to deliver best value as defined by each team member. These skills are focussed internally by each team individually for lower-order collaboration models to enable maximising their benefit whereas for higher order collaboration models, these skills are focussed on best-for-project-value outcomes.
• Relational KSAE – High levels are required between team members in addition to within teams as the order of collaboration model moves from first to fourth order (see Table 6, soft skills 4 to 10).

Best value is centred upon knowing and articulating what you need, as interviewee P30 said:

…if we really want to get value for money as the State, we've really got to put our greatest efforts into putting the business case together because it's our job to help government select the right option for the State in the business case that's value for money and then continue to progress the development of the design from thereafter using an experienced designer and an experienced builder…

In terms of understanding that lowest-bid price is different than final price, TOC P-29 said:

…So what would have happened pre alliance is that we would have got a designer to do the design. We put the design out to contractors, they would have quoted on it, we would have accepted a price, and then they would have found all sorts of difficulties in constructing it with all the landfill type issues…. So what happened in this particular case is you've got really seasoned constructors in the same room as the designers, so when the designers are trying to design, constructors are going, “well if you've got normal ground conditions you could build it like that but we're going to have all of these other issues we've got to deal with.” So by the time you get to the final design and you target it out to cost, there's been a lot of innovation up front in getting to that price.

There are circumstances where the goal and main objective of a project is to recover after an emergency. This may occur for projects responding to (natural or human-caused) disasters. They may also be a response to a business emergency, such as an accelerated new product delivery or process re-engineering where time-to-market is vital for corporate survival.

• Understanding the scope, scale, and resource demands placed upon the project recovery team.
• Understanding risk, ambiguity, and uncertainly inherent in a disaster recovery context.
• Managing the process of coping with political, social, and stakeholder issues that will impact the way that the project should proceed.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels are required regardless of the project procurement form.
• Business solutions KSAE – The best response could be simple replacement, but that is unlikely because many disasters occur as a consequence of a chain of events. High-level skills are needed in diagnosing the “real” problems, issues, and challenges, and framing an appropriate response.
• Relational KSAE – High levels are required, because often discovering the most feasible project solution requires canvassing a wide range of perspectives, and so both the POR and project team participants need high-level relational skills to effectively communicate and take appropriate action.

Crisis response is about being nimble, creative, ambidextrous, and committed, as P33 put it:

…we're also sitting in a position where we get hit by quite a few crises out there and those guys are able to respond very quickly, engage in the community, get the local workforce to get out there and deliver improvements from things like bushfires and floods.

There are times when a project is triggered by the need to experiment and try something new. Brady and Davies (2004) discuss a class of projects as “vanguard” projects whose prime purpose is co-learning and exploration. These may be to develop completely new stand-alone outcomes or be part of a ramping up of a learning curve for a more production-line approach for new standard-type projects. On other occasions, they may be piloting new products, assemblies, systems, or procedures.

• Understanding the scope, scale and resource demands placed upon the project team in developing the project delivery strategy.
• Understanding and managing risk, ambiguity and uncertainly inherent with the novel venture and effectively reflecting to optimise harvesting knowledge gained.
• Understanding and managing political, social and stakeholder issues that will impact the way that the project should proceed to ensure successful completion or if necessary abandonment of the experiment.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Particularly high levels are required to ensure a broad repertoire of potential responses to unavoidably frequent unexpected events and outcomes.
• Business solutions KSAE – High-level cognitive and adaptive skills are needed to sense and pursue opportunities while judging pragmatically how to deal with constraints and limitations to exploiting new knowledge gained.
• Relational KSAE – High levels are required because these projects often attract unconventional thinkers and this imposes communication challenges.

Large and highly hierarchical organisations may find difficulty with such projects and need to view them as a form of skunkworks or special-purpose organisation. P33 said:

I guess the alliance was formed, [XXX] did a lot of work internally to let their people know that this was a pilot in many respects, they couldn't see a way to lift their standard without changing something about their delivery…

Having a long-term relationship between PO and contractor can be useful for experimenting and piloting new ways to operate and gain advantage from ramping up a learning curve.

…on the [XXX] Alliance, we had to put concrete sleepers in, Melbourne to Sydney; and the unit rate at the start of the job was something around the $250 a sleeper, by the end of the job we had got it down to around $160 a sleeper. Now, there were lots of little subtle innovations that took place to drive that price, and that was—is another way of looking at it.

The general competitive environment can impose both opportunities and constraints upon RBP choice from a value for money perspective. In highly buoyant economic times, government agencies and other highly (employment levels and conditions) constrained organisations may form alliance-type arrangement to offer opportunities to key employees to retain and upskill them. In less buoyant economic times, POs may feel that they are in a strong position to demand more of those delivering projects.

• Understanding that the project purpose and aim fit within the current and project delivery period economic and resource availability context to maintain an appropriate balance to match project outcomes demands with available resources.
• Understanding and managing opportunities within the realities of the marketplace to avoid behaving as neither victim nor predator.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of appreciation of the demand and supply ratio of skills and competency availability for the project and their market availability.
• Business solutions KSAE – Understanding and being able to conduct and effectively communicate the business case strategy for the chosen project delivery approach.
• Relational KSAE – Effectively managing potential power and influence imbalances.

Two examples follow of alliances established in booming times.

…this was all happening at the time of the engineering boom, so if water authorities have got more projects to deliver, that means that the private industry is also going pretty well in terms of consultants and contractors. It becomes a very hot market out there. We were having trouble retaining engineers who wanted to go onto bigger and better things, either within the water industry or in the mining boom, etc. So we had to come up with a strategy that was going to provide the resources both internally and externally to not only delivery the big projects, but our overall program so we set up the [XX] Alliance a bit over four years ago.

When the government announced the capital program, it was for [XXX], there was about a $7 billion rail program. At exactly the same time they were out for tender for the biggest bridge across the river which was about a billion dollars and they had about $2 billion road program. I had a huge amount of competition for all the A-listers, now all of those contracts were generally hard dollar, with a specific risk profile. What I needed to do was come up with something that had a risk profile which was favourable in terms of the eyes of all the blue-chip companies, so just to attract them to what I was doing.

RBP forms inherently imply that there is perceived need to create, nurture, and maintain a form of a relationship, the extent of commitment may vary. Some choices may be based upon negative past experiences and the need to overcome problems caused or at least exacerbated by the chosen project procurement form. Other choices are based on positive past experience with use of a specific form of procurement that worked well within that context. Experience can form the basis for rationalising any given procurement choice within its given context.

• Understanding the causes for past positive or negative experience based on institutional drivers driven by the forms of project delivery contract.
• Understanding and appreciating how trust and commitment can be shaped by the form of project delivery procurement and behavioural requirements or habits based on specific project procurement forms.
• Understanding the big-picture and how a more holistic approach to project delivery may improve value delivered.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels relative to the deficit in KSAE that parties wishing to engage in a closer relationship perceive that they need to gain through the relationship. Most likely perceived highly complex projects need a relational approach.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of ability to understand the value proposition of various parties ability to perceive how the relationship could be of value to the other party(ies) and how to frame a response to that need that can be justified through meeting a sound business case.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of ability to be able to visualise broad relationship networks and how value to other party(ies) can be enhanced, and how to frame a constructive response to that need.

A relational rationale can be based upon filling skills, competence, and knowledge gaps through collaboration in a way that provides sufficient incentive for all involved parties. As P17 and A10 comment:

[relating to a PA] You've got to have something of significance, substance, you know, a hundred million or more. Probably the biggest flag for me really concerns cultural and some of the personalities, far more so than in a normal alliance

…they've learnt through the previous periods that the best way to achieve better outcomes is through greater levels of collaboration, so let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Let's just turn that around and use that to try and drive costs down by working together. So that's one thing that's come out of it. And another thing that's come out of it is that, to be more efficient from their own point of view of the operations, a lot of the project managers that I interviewed, said that they, “Preferred collaborative working. It was more efficient as well as more effective in the long run.”

Decisions to use a higher or lower intensive RBP form often depends upon the level of perceived complexity relating to known risks—technical, management, political/stakeholder, or for influencing commitment. Managing risks is best deployed by allowing those who can best manage the risk-taking responsibility and be compensated for doing so. This may require purposeful retention of expert staff to retain critical knowledge.

• Understanding which party is best able to manage known-known risks and who can identify known-unknown risks with the expertise to successfully investigate and then manage these kinds of risk.
• Understanding how to best compensate parties for taking responsibility and accountability for those risks.
• Understanding how to frame effective risk management through contractual arrangements.
• Having the capacity to retain critical KSAE within an organization or ensuring having access to that corporate and individual KSAE.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of ability to identify risks and optimal and effective ways to manage those risks.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of ability to justify the risk management model to be adopted.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of ability to collaborate and manage people to best develop risk management approaches.

Effective known risk management is about applying excellent KSAE within an appropriate project procurement framework to liberate otherwise dormant energy and commitment to effectively manage those risks. This may involve talent management decisions. As A09 and P28 comment:

…if you look at the top-performing companies, they don't downsize. They don't, they find innovation…so I mean if you go to Norway it's inscribed in law that you are not allowed to downsize. So you have to find different ways of managing, you have to find different ways of using talent…

Considering all the risk and all those constraints that I spoke about earlier, the alliance was the only one which was going to meet that timeframe that we were tied into and to be able to manage all the risk suitably or appropriately and all the stakeholder and the political issues associated with it…. It was a no-brainer, I mentioned one risk we'll go to is just the mines, we didn't even know where the mines were, and we didn't know the extent of them. We found out later on through bloody good luck rather than good management that some of them had methane in just as we were drilling holes. If you did that on a different form of delivery, the first thing that would all be pre-construction works and that would've taken years.

Dealing with unknown-known and unknown-unknown risks poses a particular challenge to traditional and low-level RBP forms because high levels of specification inhibits performance through encouraging defensive routines and associated high levels of transaction cost. In this hyper-uncertain and ambiguous context, the POR and project delivery management team members need a system that allows rapid flexibility to adapt to emerging realities with high level collaboration to facilitate maximising access to relevant KSAE to resolve uncertainty.

• Understanding the value of collaboration to identify those who can best contribute to managing unknown risks with the requisite expertise to successfully investigate and then manage these kinds of risk.
• Understanding how to best compensate parties for taking responsibility and accountability for those risks.
• Understanding how to frame effective risk management through contractual arrangements.
• Having the capacity to retain critical KSAE within an organisation or ensuring having access to that corporate and individual KSAE.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of ability to probe think laterally about unknown risks that can be known through making sense of patterns to develop and respond to the risks. High levels of ability to manage unknown-unknown risks through having sufficient KSAE to probe, experiment and rapidly evaluating outcomes and to calibrate risk management on that basis.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of ability to justify the risk management model to be adopted.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of ability to collaborate and manage people to best develop risk management approaches.

Effective unknown risk management is about maintaining confidence in cross-team collaboration and freedom of action to deal with risks as they emerge. As commented by A16 and P24 :

the major reasons for X doing this is because it is a rural area and it's large distances and it's also on top of mountains and through forests. So it's a big risk and it's hard to get to the places if something happens. If you have one and a half metre of snow, and all of a sudden there are 10 trees falling over and you are about 20-25 kilometres from the nearest road, to where you're supposed to fix that, it's quite problematic.

What would inevitably happen is you would get the tunnellers go through and excavate the tunnel. They hand over to their civil fit-out crew, and at the same time that the civil fit-out crews get access to the tunnel the M&E [mechanical and electrical] subcontractor is also expected to be in there…. there's a lot of technology, a lot of integrated equipment that has to be built in the latter stages normally of a project installed, pre-tested, and then commissioned. So it's a massive amount of complicated work at the backend of a project that's on a very tight time curve.

Processes rules and routines define the mechanisms by which people agree to relate and work with each other. They can have both formal and informal emphasis and requirements. This aspect of governance can have a major impact on the resulting workplace culture because it sets the tone and expectations of the relationships between teams and individuals.

• Understanding that formal rules often set boundaries upon how the informal rules are implemented either to reinforce the intended protocols or to subvert them to get around perceived needless interference with efficiency or effectiveness.
• Understanding that output and rules/processes are often closely linked through the culture that they invoke.
• Understanding that processes and rules can impose unknown risks and can be used to address known risks through such aspects as communication and escalation protocols for example.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of these are required to navigate the limitations and opportunities that processes and rules can have on how problems and opportunities are undertaken.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of these are required to ensure that the desired and designed processes and rules are in place for protection against exploitation and to facilitate opportunities for creative thinking being enhanced.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of these are required to develop trust in “the system” and how it can be ethically interpreted within the accepted norms and values of project participants and the society in which the project is delivered.

Governance processes and rules are centered upon knowing and articulating how to design a set of process and rules to effectively deal with daily issues in a way characteristic of the project procurement approach. As interviewee A09 said:

…design thinking is about bringing people with very different mindsets together, and to deal with problems as a design issue. So typically you'll have design that happens at the front end, you do it and then you might have a bit of design at the end to make it look pretty. The design thinking says the design happens the whole way through, and it's not just the designer that needs to think like the designer, you know? So it's about how you get people together to sort of make sense of problems, and collaborate to create the solution.

Thinking about how to have rules and flexibility designed into governance rules and procedures can be challenging as P22 and P24 say:

And at times they were able to switch scope between the parties so that they would – say if some civil works were holding up the M & E team, “Well, okay, we'll do those works to make sure that it gets integrated with the work we're doing,” and they'll do it rather than just complain about somebody else not doing it. And that kind of flexibility I think was characteristic of the arrangement.

There was work done with our corporate and third party lawyers to draft an initial agreement document but that agreement document evolved quite a bit after the award of the contract. It took a few months to even write down, but with good faith and all the rest of it, the parties started work without the agreement being signed as well.

The organisational structure and the way that authority and accountability is managed define the way people agree to relate and work with each other. Structures can de designed to be flexible, rigid or something in between these extremes.

• Understanding that governance structure can be designed to provide communication, knowledge, and authority links across project teams, as well as across development phases.
• Understanding that a structured way of integrating governance oversight committees and who is accountable for what across the project phases is a vital ingredient of deriving a coherent governance structure.
• Establishing and maintaining a common understanding of how the governance structure engages people across project teams so that each person understands what is expected of them, who they are accountable to, and how each level of accountability should behave.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels are required to decide what issues can be handled at each of the governance structure levels and which ones should be escalated. This requires both the technical KSAE to deal with this as well as PM KSAE to know how to shape, communicate, and respond to specific issues to be dealt with.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels are required to ensure that the desired and designed governance structure facilitates the outcome assumptions made in the business plan.
• Relational KSAE – High levels are required to ensure that appropriate communication and coordination of effort is delivered to match the governance structures in place and how to effectively use informal structures to support project expected outcomes.

Governance structure includes the way, in PAs in particular, that the leadership oversight team provides and facilitates sufficient supervision, support and guidance to the project management team level in order to facilitate the desired and designed-in level of collaboration and coordination of effective action. As P29 says:

They're called project managers, but at the end of the day they were managing contracts. So what we've actually done within the alliance it is very much more that they are project managers and they are involved right from the word go from the design, in terms of the detailed design. So we have a planning area that takes it up to a concept design level…and basically we would have a design team, a construction team, but then a project management team over the top. So that project manager would be involved in the project from almost before the project is initiated with the alliance. Would follow through, make sure the design was through and then through to construction. So really taking it from concept design through to handover to the client, which is our operations team.

In terms of structuring a programme alliance to facilitate upskilling of the PO and for the alliance NOPs to better understand the POR team work methods and culture P32 says:

…as part of the agreement we've said that 45% of the office-based staff, being the engineers and the programme managers and so on, needs to be X-PO people. And even the field staff, because we've had some small resource, we want to embed some of our field people in to work alongside your people as well. So we've got about 20 people embedded in that as well.

In terms of structuring the governance system to provide sufficient “voice” for the project participants to facilitate not only effective decision making but also effective action, P26 says;

I was actually part of the AMT, because I was one of the senior, senior staff members for the project as commissioning manager. The ALT was represented onto by the project director and then two X staff and a couple of staff from Y and Z. So there was an escalation process for matters and things like that, but from an AMT level, to be quite honest, I mean at times the whole AMT probably consisted of about eight to ten people and there was only, at peak, there was only two X staff on that project, on that management team. So you've really got to look at, you've got ask the question about balance on that.

Best value is defined through key result areas and key performance indicators and these are part of the project governance overall structure. Their shape and content may be well defined in a business case and then translated into specific KRAs and KPIs through project team collaboration or by the POR through a hierarchical specification. They should effectively translate what the project value and benefit was expected to be delivered and be used to monitor and influence the project output and outcome.

• Understanding the link between being clear about what success looks like in this context and how it can be defined and measured.
• Understanding how to effectively use performance standards to achieve expectations, including how they may be used in any incentivisation strategy.
• Establishing and maintaining common understanding of how KRAs guide development of KPIs that promote and facilitate common understanding across project teams of what benefits the project should achieve.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Understanding the technical complexity of KRAs and KPIs and how to specify them practically so that they fulfill their purpose.
• Business solutions KSAE – Understanding how they can align business case objectives with delivered outputs and outcomes that minimise unintended negative consequences.
• Relational KSAE – How to best engages those who will use these to ensure that they are well designed in terms of being clear, unambiguous, and performable, while still presenting an element of stretch targets to challenge teams to achieve continuous improvement.

In terms of the project team's common standards and values, KRAs and KPIs provide a benchmark measure. As A09 states:

These guys collaborated, but they added uncertainty and ambiguity to it by having complex array of KPIs, viewing industry standards as business as usual, or what they now call “minimum conditions of satisfaction,” and saying that we're an alliance and we're special so we shouldn't accept business as usual, so we'll make the industry standards of “excellent” our “business as usual,” because we're offering something different.

In terms of how these were developed in a PA context, P20, P28, and P29 stated:

…so the KRAs were initially developed by the owner very early on and massaged to death might I say, you can quote me on that, but finalised at the time of agreeing the TOC as well, so the TOC was really, the value and the scope of work that we landed on in the TOC had to reflect the KRAs that we had for the project and also had to reflect the initial business case of the project, so all of that alignment of value statements and value requirements had to be done at the time of TOC to make sure that what we were putting forward was going to meet the objectives that we had initially planned, but also was going to create that value that we had promised.

Out of the main objectives, the client's objectives and what the client wanted to achieve out of this project fell to the KRAs and the then the KPIs. We had about five or six KRAs

…Above normal expectations as well because you've got to keep raising the bar so I think a lot of the alliances, we have our alliance advisors and they had these KPIs but we soon worked out they didn't really mean much to us. You'd end up doing a lot of surveys and all sorts of things so we spent a lot of effort trying to make those KPIs-I think we've achieved it now. Really meaningful and really linked to dollars. If I was doing an alliance again, I wouldn't worry about them terribly much. At the end of the day, if you're delivering the project and delivering it for good dollars’ value, everything else has to fit in anyhow in order for you to achieve that, so I'd keep the key result areas and the KPIs very simple.

And in terms of just what these measures attempt to define, P34 says:

…the KRAs were around reducing congestion, improving safety, improving connectivity. And that improving connectivity is also about access control as well. Then community relations; so a very difficult community that we were living in, and socially very poor, and lastly, the integration with the maintenance regime.

Responsibility and manner of accountability has to be decided upon for any project. The nature and quality of the conversation in terms of understanding each party's perspective and respecting each party's obligations provide a defining basis for a specific project procurement form. Conversations reflect the assumptions made relating to the degree of appreciation and validity of information and power asymmetries. Risks are generally known and can be openly discussed, but uncertainty and ambiguity represent shadow conversations where systems need to be designed to address these proactively or reactively as they arise and become risks. The broader conversation should consider both known and unknown risks and their mitigation.

• Understanding the risk-taking appetite and ability of all parties including the PO.
• Understanding the perspective of various project parties’ position on risk and uncertainly accountability and their strengths and limitations in articulating their position and engaging in conversation and negotiation on a risk mitigation platform.
• Understanding how to discuss and develop systemic processes and protocols that can be used to address known and unknown risks.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical knowledge are needed about potential risk and uncertainty relating to the project inputs and design and delivery processes and how they are connected.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of how identified and anticipated risk and uncertainties may impact the project business case.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of perspective taking skills to be able to empathise with other parties sufficiently to help them articulate risks and uncertainties and how these may be addressed.

The degree to which the PO or other parties accept risk varies dramatically with the procurement approach. As interviewee A13 and p17 said:

What they said in T5 “No, we're going to take all the risk because ultimately it comes back to us anyway. We're going to have integrated project teams involving the client and we'll call them partners in our framework agreement, first tier suppliers of work and then the partners will be responsible for pushing this down to their separate owners in the same spirit of that,” the spirit of cooperation and so on. In return for this, BAA said “We'll pay you what it costs to build this building, to build this construction rather than having a fixed price because what happens traditionally in construction is that you go in with a low bid, the lowest bidder wins and then you get litigation and you try and get contract variations in order to just be able to make a profit.”

So where you have an alliance where the scope of the alliance is to deliver the whole project, and then you have some critical conversations where you have to reach alignment between the owner and non-owner on what risks and opportunities are going to be shared by the alliance participants, and that generally forces a conversation, which is complicated enough, about how do you deal with risks that you don't control.

This can be contrasted with a citation from (Smalley, Lado-Byrnes, & Howe, 2004, p. 40) which says:

…main contractors’ prices will include a “risk allowance.” However, this allowance is only to cover the risks that the main contractor may be responsible for…. This practice is replicated throughout the supply chain…. most clients will include a “contingency” to cover the occurrence of risks that they will be responsible for – primarily, outright variations to the works, “design development” (i.e., design team variations which clients will have to pay for) and events that will entitle the main contractor to compensation under the relevant contractual arrangements.

No one is actually identifying and managing the combination of both sets of risks. To do this properly requires the input of all relevant parties (namely the client, main contractors, designers, cost consultants, and probably relevant subcontractors). The occurrence of risks affecting the project are potentially damaging to all parties, but particularly to the client, who will rarely be compensated by liquidated damages or other means for the disruption suffered by late completion and/or disputes about compensation.

Taking action to mitigate known and unknown risk involves the process of moving from conversation to action after having taken all necessary preparation steps to obtain political and procedural permission to take the action that was decided upon.

• Understanding the contextual opportunities and threats posed by the governance system.
• Having an ability to anticipate and prepare for necessary negotiations, including understanding the value proposition of all affected parties.
• Being able to visualise and conceptualise innovative solutions to systemic and administrative barriers that may impede optimal risk mitigation solutions that have been identified and agreed upon to implement.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical knowledge about the risk impact and effects and how mitigation choices may trigger flow-on effects.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of the political and energy “cost” and benefit of the mitigation strategy to the business case.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of cognitive, persuasive, and influencing capacity to discover how to gain team support to advance a mitigation strategy, as well as how to tactically deploy actions to ensure that mitigation actions take place.

Some actions may appear quite radical such as on the T5 project (and this is also more common with PAs) a common platform of project insurance was established. As reported by the National Audit Office (2005, p. 6):

BAA took out project-wide insurance covering loss or damage to property, for injury, for death and also covering professional indemnity. Bulk-buying ensured the cover was in place and was tailored to meet the needs of the project. It reduced the costs of insurance, and avoided wasted effort and duplication on behalf of all the partners.

Being able to draw a project team around a technical problem that may have far-reaching impact that avoids cost, time, and other social performance measures of project success is another effective risk mitigation strategy deployed in PAs, as P30 stated:

…what I'm getting at there is the importance of the avenue of a new line of trees. The importance has come out so much in favor of the retention of the trees that we couldn't deliver [XXX] road extension as we originally planned to do. We had to get a permit to remove four elm trees to put a roundabout to form a connection to the [YYY] Freeway. Now in a design and construct environment, we as a client would be facing huge claims from the contractor, being delay, loss of productivity, and all this sort of stuff, but with an alliance—with the cooperative arrangement, we got some excellent advice about planning process and to really further our endeavors to obtain a permit and we didn't face claims as a result. We were basically able to conclude the alliance amicably and pay all fair and reasonable costs without compensating for losses, etc.

The PO and all project participants each exist within their own organisational systems and the project is also subject to its own environmental, economic, political, etc., system. Risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity present challenges when the way that they interact is not well understood. Inevitably, some entity or team needs to build bridges, links, and understanding across multiple system boundaries, so that risks can be mitigated and managed. The level of system integration knowledge and coping mechanisms can be highly influenced by the project procurement form.

• Understanding the contextual interaction of each participant in a project and how these interact with the project-external world.
• Sourcing the necessary people to explore and map the systems terrain.
• Being able to understand how to influence, facilitate and even take action to improve integration of systems that pose risk and uncertainty challenges through providing a common platform of project system interaction to deal with risk.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and administrative knowledge about the systems faced by the project.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of the political and of the mitigation strategy to the business case.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of cognitive, persuasive, and influencing capacity to discover how to gain team support to advance a mitigation strategy as well as how to tactically deploy actions to ensure that mitigation actions take place.

Systems thinking is quite problematic in most BAU settings because contractors particularly have outsourced so much of the “actual” coalface work. They are good at understanding the supply chain and its strengths and weaknesses, but they often have difficulty in seeing interactions within their own organisations. The frequent disconnect between the bid team and the delivery team leaves gaps, inconsistences, and ambiguities that lead to risk and uncertainty about who is doing what. As A11 illustrates the problem:

One of the things that the literature talks about quite a lot is main contractors being systems integrators, largely because most of them don't produce anything these days. They subcontract everything, and so they have this integrative function linking in with what I was saying earlier from the interviews. One of the things that came out very clearly from all the interviews is that over the project life cycle, all these major contractors have a different system in each of their functions that are not interlinked. So they're not even integrated in their own operations, so business development operates separately from bid management, which operates separately from procurement, from project management and so on, and it's not just in terms of silo thinking. It's in terms, that the systems that they use to conduct their function; the processes, don't interface with each other….So their ability to integrate others is hampered and their ability to put forward value prompt propositions that add value for clients is hampered by their lack of ability to join up their systems internally and provide a seamless content; a seamless service, along those lines.

As one highly experienced PA director and manager (P34) summed up the way that risks are commonly perceived with a PA road infrastructure project context:

…strategy-wise, there were things like the community involvement, cycle access, cross motorway access, so both type for as well as numbers of. And I guess, probably most importantly the landscape—not the landscape but the—yeah, yeah, urban design outcomes met the—had to meet the strategic goals.

The level of inter-systems complexity can be overwhelming so the approach to leadership in this context may be best suited to the complexity and chaotic situations that Snowden describes in his Cynefin Framework (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003). As P18 describes the U.K. situation for a rail PA form that may have severe project external system impacts:

…it's probably more complex here because, if you like, the – it is just a railway. Really we've been with the Victorian railway, and the congestion of places like Kings Cross – there are certain aspects that we're working on with some – alliance. For example, the X alliance. It's not a big project, I think it's about 30 odd million, but basically anything they do has the potential of bringing down the east coast mainland.

And in terms of the aerospace industry when building new-generation jetliners, P04 stated about system integration of risk (that shares similarities with engineering infrastructure and other PM sector) stated:

Now you then say well, how do put an engine on or landing gear? The air framer, the aircraft manufacture will say, “Okay I have an aeroplane weighing this amount. I want to have two landing gear, and a third on in the middle of the fuselage, this is the design I want to make my aeroplane work.” Then he'll go out to the landing gear manufacturers, and as I said there is not a huge number, and say “This is what I want, now how do you,” the landing gear manufacturer, “how do you integrate a landing gear on my airplane that would do all these things,” specify the weight, the height of the landing gear, etcetera, etcetera. “You tell me how you put that on there and how much it's going to cost me to put that on there.” Then you use the expertise of the subcontractors, and once you've selected your subcontractor that's where the integration between, I use the landing gear just as an example, the landing gear to the aircraft. How does it integrate? How it swing and shut in the landing gear bay? It could be the electrical, where do my black boxes sit in the aircraft? How much wiring do I need? The expertise for that little bit is held within the subcontractor. He's got his own aeronautical or electrical engineers who likewise that's his core competency.

A key joint communication strategy relates to parties each understanding what is expected of them and how to respond. Terms or language may differ for processes and systems and subsystems. A PO's “hands-off” approach would assume that each participant will handle their business and management processes internally but conform to contractual requirements for progress reporting and use of the POR's standard for accountability processes. By contrast, a highly POR “hands-on” approach such as that for PAS and the T5-type procurement approach would entail common processes be adopted by all participants and even a common bank account for all project-related financial transactions.

• Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of using common processes and systems.
• Having an ability to map system gaps and interoperability to be able to adapt internal systems or negotiate any justifiable and necessary compromises to share system facilities.
• Having a sound knowledge of national, regional, and local legislative requirements that may impose challenges on how to conduct project business where the POR processes and system are in conflict with project team participant's legal, business, or ethical obligations.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and administrative knowledge about the processes and systems used in managing the project and how to adapt them as required to meet requirements of the project procurement form being used.
• Business solutions KSAE– High levels of understanding of the political and business implications to adopting/adapting common processes and systems.
• Relational KSAE– High levels of cognitive, persuasive, and influencing capacity to negotiate and action any necessary adaption plans to develop the use of common processes and systems.

PORs getting large contractors to adapt their in-house processes and systems can be a challenge. As A07 and P32 states:

X is very active in South America, always been, since the construction crisis in the 1990s in Germany that almost wiped out the whole construction industry at that time. Since then, what they've done is they've replicated the model that they use in Germany, and even though they employ the local supply chain, for instance in Argentina and Brazil and so on, it's not dissimilar to what they would be doing in Germany, and again what you see underlying this is a very, very strong corporate organisation. It's a not a hollowed-out organisation. It's a very strong organisation which has very strong design teams, very strong R&D teams. Sometimes, for instance, it's not unusual for the large German contractors to build their own machinery, to build their own software themselves. They don't outsource that to software developers.

The things where we've really had problems, I think one of the issues was things like getting our financial systems to talk to each other. Contractors’ financial systems are set up differently to ours and yet at the end of the day we need the same information, but we probably need different information to what a contractor normally needs, so that's been an issue.

The reality of most organisations is that their own internal systems do not fully “talk to each other,” as A10 and A13 state:

One of the things that came out very clearly from all the interviews is that over the project life cycle, all these major contractors have a different system in each of their functions that are not interlinked. So they're not even integrated in their own operations, so business development operates separately from bid management, which operates separately from procurement, from project management and so on, and it's not just in terms of silo thinking. It's in terms, that the systems that they use to conduct their function; the processes don't interface with each other. Now that's okay; in a sense if you've got a soft system that's overarching, that compensates for that. You see you create your own, as it were alliance along the project life cycle, but none of them have. None of them had at all. So their ability to integrate others is hampered, and their ability to put forward value prompt propositions that add value for clients is hampered by their lack of ability to join up their systems internally and provide a seamless content; a seamless service, along those lines.

One of the problems of the fragmented supply chain in construction is that there's lots of opportunities for misinformation and for people not to be working to the same drawings, not working to the same design when changes are made and so on, and so they said “We're just going to have one model that everybody uses, a master model. If changes are made on that, everybody sees those changes” so you don't get this opportunity for misinformation to go through.

A key joint communication strategy also relates to parties being able to communicate easily, quickly, and with a suitable audit trail to retrieve documents and message when required. Many projects these days use either the same ICT communication groupware tools or use compatible ones so that interoperability does not present any problems. There is a specific need in high-collaboration project delivery forms, though, for common platforms to ensure that everyone is working with the same data on design and production, and that monitoring and control systems are integrated and interoperable.

• Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of using common communication platforms and what they demand in terms of system development and support.
• Having an ability to map system gaps and interoperability to being able to adapt internal communication systems, or be able to negotiate any justifiable and necessary compromises in using the POR's or that of a leading NOP.
• Having sufficient access to system support to ensure that the risk of system downtime is minimised.
• Comprehending and taking action on the necessary requirements for archiving information and data and operability issues associated with legacy data and ICT systems.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of ICT technical and administrative knowledge about the software and hardware systems used in managing the project and how to adapt them as required by the project procurement form.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of the political and business implications to adopting/adapting common ICT and other communication systems. Common ICT platform use on projects sparks potential risk issues about ownership rights of information and implicit intellectual property, accuracy, and accountability for errors, discrepancies, and ambiguity.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of cognitive, persuasive, and influencing capacity to negotiate and act on any necessary adaption plans to develop the use of common communication tools and systems.

One of the more common tools common ICT used in construction and engineering projects is building information modelling (BIM). Recently, the U.K. and Singapore have mandated the use of BIM using a common project team platform on all infrastructure delivery projects. As the U.K. Cabinet Office (2011, p. 14) states:

2.32 Government will require fully collaborative 3D BIM (with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic) as a minimum by 2016.

The T5 project was famous for its use of BIM and integrated systems, as A13 states:

The other thing here we have the single digital model. One of the problems of the fragmented supply chain in construction is that there is lots of opportunities for misinformation and for people not to be working to the same drawings, not working to the same design when changes are made and so on, and so they said “We're just going to have one model that everybody uses, a master model. If changes are made on that everybody sees those changes” so you don't get this opportunity for misinformation to go through.

Integrated ICT systems are especially needed for programme alliances where a common cluster of organisations enjoy long-term engagement. As P31 observed on a programme alliance:

They link into our portal to get access to a whole heap of system-based stuff. So training information, toolboxes, you know, templates, checklists, procedures, and all that sort of stuff. But not so much, you know, access to programming or estimates or anything like that. We use a cloud-based system called CMO or Compliance Management Office and so through that, they can log on and get hold of all of that information

Leaders can inspire motivation toward unity of purpose by physically interacting with individuals in the various levels of an organisation. On complex multi-organisational participant projects, there is a challenge for the project leadership group to maintain common vision and direction on what the project is expected to deliver and achieve. Individual organisational leaders also need to be visible and to engage with their employees to highlight the need to enthusiastically and effectively support the project vision, aims, and objectives.

• The overall project leadership team having the ability to understand the need for publicising a common vision, aim, and objectives for the project, but to also take action to ensure that all project participant employees experience “rhetoric” matching “reality.”
• Openness of the project leadership team to accept the perspectives of others from lower levels in the hierarchy when visiting the worksite or meeting them in other venues.
• Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of encouraging an open and low power-distance, low information-asymmetry workplace culture to enhance hierarchical integration opportunities.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels stakeholder engagement skills and sufficient technical KSAE to be able to intelligently interact with others who may have specific technical points to express.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of the importance of vision and how that is disseminated and effectively turned into action.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of capacity to communicate and deal with people to perceive and consider their perspective.

In illustrating the need for a project leadership team to be visible and engaging P28 and P33 say:

Each ALT member was a champion for a KRA to get them out there with an AMT member and then that would get them onsite and things like that. It's important that the ALT be onsite as much as possible, be visible, the other thing exhibits the behaviours that the alliance has got and walk the talk with everybody else. We were pretty lucky we had two or three who probably got there weekly, as I said I got there nearly every day, to me that wasn't an issue but to other people it was a big issue because they saw me coming as an ALT representative and the ALT chair. They're all just little bits in helping the culture.

…it'd be great to have the ALT more visible onsite, more presence onsite but when you've got general managers, national managers, and company directors on the ALT it's sometimes difficult.

Initially, every month and then every – about six months into it, it was every three months. In the initial statement it was on every month.

Sometimes I held it [ALT meeting] at nine o'clock at night, nine through until two in the morning, it was just depending on getting the diaries synced but we wouldn't have the meeting unless the people that were nominated on the ALT were at that meeting.

[question asked] And that would give you the authority to be able to make decisions very quickly? [response] Precisely. There were a couple that we had at four o'clock in the morning.

I guess the ALT both sides have been pretty influential in making sure they get down to the ground where the rubber hits the road, so at the depot level and the ALT, AMT too, would conduct, you know, tool box talks with debriefs on results and those sorts of things to the whole workforce. We go about having meetings in different locations, so whether it be [X-depot], [Y-depot], [Z-depot] in the various depots that we maintain in those areas, so our visibility is certainly there.

Proximity of access for not only formal meetings but also informal, ad hoc interaction is highly important in facilitating an environment where people can discuss and sort out issues, build trust and effectively communicate as and when required. Co-location, however, does not mean that off-site fabrication cannot occur.

• Teams from across the supply chain being located within a common campus that is comfortable, inviting, and a suitable venue for collaboration.
• Effective virtual locations in which people can assemble to discuss issues, problems and solutions. Increasingly, this occurs in virtual environments such as in the “second life” software virtual reality tool or through Skype and other similar communication devices.
• The development and application of social media is changing conceptions of what being co-located means. These technologies encourage hybrid means of co-location so that essential people that are not able to physically meet in one physical space can join a meeting virtually using social media technology.

• Technical and PM KSAE – No specific KSAE are required.
• Business solutions KSAE – Understanding the importance and value of co-location from a team interaction perspective is useful.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of capacity to communicate and deal with people to perceive and consider their perspective. This is extremely useful in capitalising on co-location advantages.

Co-location can be critical in resolving issues when rapid response is needed as A16, P20 and P34 say:

…a co-location, everything. And signs on the buildings with [Project A], so basically a project or an organisation separate from [X-team] and [Y-team]. And some of the people quit their permanent position in [Y-team] and were hired in the project organisation for the six years that the project should exist

No, I found the ALT, our ALT was willing to climb in and get involved when they needed to, a good example is we, last week we had a little issue with some of the lane conditions on a circular road area, affecting some of the pavement that we have to do out there, and we had an ALT meeting about a week ago and they said, you know we think we want an update on this. I said okay I'll send you an email update and they said no let's catch up, we'll find an hour let's catch up next week, and three out of the five ALT members came down and caught up, and that's the sort of involvement, they're willing to climb in and they're willing to make phone calls if I need them to, so they've been good.

[X-team] collocated as well, had a team that co-located, and again, you have individuals who don't quite get it, but generally quite good about, you know, we're here to get this project completed. Didn't extend, as I said earlier, it sort of overall, to every single team outside the alliance, but certainly to the major ones, we got the collaborative approach working with the major subcontractors.

Authentic leadership is present in designated project leaders who hold institutional or organisational power, but it also applies to “followers” within a collective leadership sense.

Leaders consistently think in systems terms and how the situational context functions within the immediate system and also between and across related systems. This prompts a response to complex and difficult situations to first understand the context and let that guide decision making and action.

• Project team participants having the ability to understand the situation through critical analysis, questioning assumptions, and pattern matching what is known, felt, and observed with how the situation fits useful hypotheses and theories about how the situation should behave within the perceived system and galaxy of systems.
• Actively seeking out a range of perceptions about a situation and questioning how relevant these may be in confirming, rejecting, or modifying a working hypothesis or theory of the situation and which contextual aspects are salient.
• Having a disposition of confidence to cease action and think and then let reflection guide further decision making and action taking.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having sufficient technical KSAE to appreciate the relevance of working hypotheses and theories of situational context to be able to make decisions and take action. Having sufficient PM KSAE to understand dependency and impact of decision making within project constraints and the project vision, aim, and objectives
• Business solutions KSAE – Understanding the impact of contemplated action on the business case and the project outcome.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of capacity to communicate and deal with people to gain their perspective in order to frame and test working hypotheses and theories of the situational context.

Having an outside view of a situation can be enlightening. An ability to view and perceive a situation as seen with fresh eyes. This reflection was on the construction industry's BAU culture and paradigm. On the subject of non-cognates (that is, people who are in a project team but have little or no technical skills of that situation) A10 said of a conversation with one of his post-graduate students:

One of my students who was non-cognate went to work for a construction company and came back and I can't remember why she came and I said, “What's your observation then? You're now in construction. What do you see?” And she said, “Well it's, what I see is not good. What I see is an industry that's based on kind of incompetency and mediocrity and the systems are there that are self-serving. Various groups are basically just pursuing their own interests and nobody's really interested in the client at all. The client comes second and all of the systems that are in place are about trying to deal with and corrupt the official systems,” so she says, “it's a very chaotic industry.”

P30 discussed the ability of project participants who did not have prior PA experience to reflect on how working within a PA context presented challenges to them.

…you've got to have people that have got a pretty good degree of experience in the organisation that they represent. That they know their policies, they know their practices and procedures, they know what the intent is and be flexible and agile enough to move into a different team environment which has got a different set of policies potentially, but making sure that they can marry up with the home-based policies so that you're not contravening them.

Leaders and team members consistently think in practical terms, what will work, what is effective rather than what is efficient. They are politically astute and conscious of their situational context and use that knowledge and mind set to guide decision making and action.

• Project team participants having the ability to make sense of all forms of power and influence to steer decision making and action. Having a technically practical approach.
• Having a greater focus on effectiveness over efficiency to win wars rather than win battles.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having sufficient KSAE to understand the short-term and long-term impact of decisions and action.
• Business solutions KSAE – Understanding the impact of contemplated action on the business case and the project outcome.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of capacity to know who to communicate with and how pitch their communication format and message in dealing with people to gain their approval and/or support to take decisions or actions.

A reflection by P22 on a colleague who led a significant project illustrates the value of scepticism as part of being pragmatic. This is a general quote about that individual.

…he is one of those guys who comes across as, you know, the big, gruff, tough project manager, but he's actually a lot more intelligent than he portrays in the first instance and probably a lot smarter than to dismiss something outright, but approaching it with more than a healthy level of skepticism about how valuable this arrangement might be in this circumstance.

And on the way that a particular PA was conducted pragmatically, P26 and P21 said:

…toward the end it was actually realised that the civil people were better positioned to do these kind of things, so they actually got onto the work and did it. The working relationship on the ground is that people on the ground worked fairly well together.

So what we did as part of the [Project X] influencing the alliance was to actually get an independent theatre planner put on board as well as the acoustician. Now that created a whole lot of tensions with the acoustician but it's actually resulted in a better outcome, and it probably wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been an alliance, because the most efficient and cheapest way to do is just to hire one company to do the lot.

Leaders and team members consistently think about the context and value of others’ perspective. Often an idea or suggestion may sound inappropriate or even crazy, but when assumptions and cultural (work or organisational) context is unpacked, the idea can be worked on to provide a novel and innovative solution to an issue. Having the ability and patience to appreciate the validity of the perspective of others is vital to authentic leadership. This is one part of the emotional intelligence (EI) spectrum of KSAE.

• Project team participants making sense of other people's perspective through active listening and also being pragmatic about sources of ideas.
• Having a greater focus on effectiveness through being able to appreciate that innovation often begins with novel, unusual, or even crazy-sounding ideas that are explored and developed by people with a multitude of perspectives.
• Having sufficient humility to recognise the value of practical knowledge.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having sufficient technical and PM baseline KSAE to understand how to respond to insights and ideas offered by others when decision making or planning or taking action.
• Business solutions KSAE – Understanding the impact of contemplated action on the business case and the project outcome.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of capacity to communicate and deal with people to encourage contributing ideas and feedback and support to take decisions or actions.

Participant A10, when asked about the role of empathy as an appreciation factor in EI, had the following to say when asked, Do you get any sense that they were good at perception taking?

They could but largely they didn't because they were very task-orientated; they were very task-focused. They were inward-looking, looking at let's just get the job done. Let's just get the functions working properly rather than looking at what the interests of the other parties were; stakeholders or the clients. And in fact, from a marketing perspective but it relates to value, one of the things that came out very strongly is that the value propositions were heavily compromised because they were so inward-looking; so inward-focused.

P20 commented upon the cross team multi-disciplinary nature of a PA and how it may be improved. She said:

I think the leadership team and the management team has functioned really well, there have been other subgroups within the project that where alliancing behaviour has been harder to infiltrate, and I think there are probably in hindsight some things we could have done differently, that we should have done differently in order to improve that, it's a very multicultural group we've got out here. We have architects, we have builders, we have acousticians, we have [facility users] people, you know, and project managers in the office and they're not people who are always used to working together in the same environment and that sort of smash of cultures in the project office occasionally has been challenging to manage…

And on a different PA, P23 stated:

I think an attitude more than anything, someone that was prepared to sit down and listen to both sides of this team and try and understand what the issues were.

[Contractor X] provided a lot of benefits in the development of the design simply because of their hands-on practical experience in what works and ways and means of building the same system more cheaply but just as effectively. I mean they brought to the table the smarts of the actual constructor and ways of achieving the same result at reduced costs so they were very valuable. We put up various things and they'd say oh no, we tried that over in West Australia and it didn't work and we needed to do this, that, or the other and that really, so you avoid reinventing the wheel and making the same mistakes from their experience.

Resilience, adaptability, versatility, flexibility, and being persistent when faced with adversity characterises this element of ethical leadership and subtheme from the data. Leaders and team members are able to effectively reframe the situation to be able to cope with them, often to advantage.

• Projects seldom, if ever, run to plan. Complex projects such as the infrastructure engineering ones examined in this study provide typical examples where “unknown-unknowns” appear regularly to disrupt plans and action. Apart from environmental (climate, business, or political landscape) challenges, well-planned approaches to address issues may take unexpected turns due to inadequate assumptions being made.
• In the IT PM-world, the concept of agile is gaining momentum. In the aid recovery world, there are many examples of the need to be versatile and adaptive, as has been reported upon in a recent PhD thesis (Steinfort, 2010). Steinfort also shows that understanding local culture and context is critical to effective resilience.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having sufficient technical and PM baseline KSAE to understand how to respond to complex technology issues and which sets of skills and knowledge to adopt or adapt.
• Business solutions KSAE– Understanding the impact of the need for resilience to adapt plans and action to meet the business case objectives and the project outcome.
• Relational KSAE– High levels of capacity to communicate and deal with people to shape and mould their repertoire of KSAE to support being flexible in response to taking decisions or actions.

In terms of a quote from a programme alliance with a set of different challenges and opportunities, two are presented from P33; one relating to resilience about what to do with gains in productivity, and the other about responding to environmental disaster faced by the PO:

…what we'd rather do is if we are going ahead of schedule, not pull up stumps and then work out what to do with the left over money is to keep going, to increase scope or keep going basically until you find that you've spent the funds that you'd settled for that particular process. I guess we have done a lot of work in ensuring that if we are working around those gain-share areas that we'd much rather see that money invested in the asset because the more we invest in the asset, the more we save in maintenance costs.

…but we're also sitting in a position where we get hit by quite a few crises out there and those guys are able to respond very quickly, engage in the community, get the local workforce to get out there and deliver improvements from things like bushfires and floods that could have really hamstrung the bigger organisations for longer. I think from that perspective the working with the AMT and the ALT, so the ALT, if you just go back to the first lot of floods, made a call pretty quickly saying nah, [XXXX programme alliance] is going to deliver all this work, and as a result [XXXX programme alliance] was Johnny-on-the-spot and delivered, organized it, project managed all the work including ensuring that the claims and the bills got paid from the insurer as well to make sure Y [PO] were covered.

Balancing interests and being flexible, steadfast, and flexible in approaches to issues and contractual ways to facilitate flexibility is illustrated in a case of a PA set within a D&C context. P17 was the project facilitator and stated that:

I think the focus has to be on are the people from the main contractor, who is the equivalent of the owner in this relationship, have they got the maturity, the flexibility, and the leadership qualities to be able to manage the inevitable conflicts of interest that are going to arise between the interests of the overall project and the interests of the alliance that sits within the project. If you've got somebody who's got a very autocratic leadership style, extremely autocratic, who's only going to use this as a way of trying to bully a mechanic and electrical contractor, whoever it is, that's not a good recipe for this working well. It's got to be a relationship between equals.

Leaders and team members have opinions and advice that is valued their reputation and demonstration of integrity make them valuable as brokers of change, leading innovation and managing challenging complex situations. They have sufficient integrity and sound judgement to realise how to effectively frame and justify questions to be asked and answers provided in decision making and action taking. They also know how and when to close options effectively.

• Project team participants making sense other people's perspective through active listening and also being pragmatic about sources of ideas.
• Project team participants having a greater focus on effectiveness through being able to appreciate that innovation often begins with novel, unusual, or even crazy sounding ideas that are explored and developed by people with a multitude of perspectives.
• Project team participants being able to frame and justify changes in direction in response to difficult choices and challenges that can be broadly accepted.
• Having the ability to move from divergent exploratory thinking to convergent thinking when settling on a decision and understanding the appropriate response in known-known to unknown-unknown situations (see the Cyefin framework discussion earlier). That is, knowing which questions to ask and which answers to accept as most relevant to the context.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having sufficient technical and PM baseline KSAE to understand how to constructively listen to others.
• Business solutions KSAE – Understanding the impact on the business case and the project outcome of wise consideration, decision making, and interaction with people.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of capacity to communicate and deal with people to deal with people to build, develop and maintain, credibility and trust in their decision-making and action-taking approach.

In relation to making sense of others’ perspective in order to frame a solution, A11 and P17 state that:

What they really need is for project managers to interface with stakeholders and clients, client departments; whichever they are. Some of those are quite difficult to identify, in the sense that it may be several departments trying to act together and so they're looking for people who will think without the encumbrance of an engineering background. So I think that's why they have recruited non-cognates because they get again better alignment of the client needs, better project definition, and it's not about let's design something based on what's technically feasible. It's about let's design something that really satisfies the needs, and that's what non-cognates are ready to do.

I think the focus has to be on are the people from the main contractor, who is the equivalent of the owner in this relationship, have they got the maturity, the flexibility and the leadership qualities to be able to manage the inevitable conflicts of interest that are going to arise between the interests of the overall project and the interests of the alliance that sits within the project.

In terms of selecting leaders and team managers with sound judgement and integrity in question-framing and decision-making for action, as P18 and P20 said:

…what we've put together for alliances is what we call a Right Person Right Job selection process. And so we're – normal project selection would be, “does he have the right technical skills? Does he have the experience? Is he available? Right, give him the job.”

…I think part of being an alliance manager is about your personal style and it's very important to behave very neutrally and to, I think lead by example as well, I'd like to hope that I do, I'm probably better at interviewing them, but I think the assessment was, I would imagine that I could sort of behave in that neutral impartial way that was going to best for the project, regardless of the issue. It's very important not to be seen to be favouring one side or the other.

Drawing upon an interview we undertook in another study (Walker & Lloyd-Walker, 2011c, p. 61) interviewee 02 from that study said in relation to this aspect of authentic leadership:

“If you've got people that are absolute stars that can't relate to other members within the team, then you've really got to get rid of them because they're going to be counterproductive…. I think they would have to be a person who you would obviously respect for their ability, for their experience, for their technical capability and someone that could relate to people. If they don't relate to people, then any one of those things could ring alarm bells. But I think really one of the things I've learnt is that you must respect your client and you must respect the people that are members of your team. If you don't give that respect, you can't expect to receive it. That is not such an easy task at times.”

And in terms of knowing what questions to ask and how to respond to answers in convergent and different thinking terms, IV-06 in that study said:

So the level of technical detail I don't need to be across, but I do need to be able to ask sensible questions about it, if we're in a pricing discussion or something like that. Somebody is saying “we need X tonnes of rock to do this” – I have to have a bit of enough knowledge to say “that seems like a lot,” or “that doesn't seem enough,” or at least knowing that I should ask the question about the volume…. I probably have less onus on me to actually be able to ask some of those challenging questions, because you've already got 10 people with that level of technical knowledge who are doing all of that. And then it becomes more about encouraging those 10 people to do the challenging, and use their expertise in perhaps a slightly different way than they might be useful, which is getting everything out on the table.

Leaders and team members demonstrate the courage and have sufficient influence and respect to effectively challenge assumptions and often offer radical alternative solutions to resolve complex and difficult situations.

• Project team participants being unafraid to express opinions, feedback, views on plans and action and in contributing ideas.
• Project team participants having sufficient EI and KSAE to frame views constructively yet firmly so that they are effectively considered and valued.
• Project team participants being committed to challenging BAU and to actively seek continuous improvement and best-for-project outcomes through persuasive argument.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having sufficient technical and PM baseline KSAE to feel confident in voicing views, feedback and contributions to decision making and action.
• Business solutions KSAE– Understanding the impact of spirited challenges and stretch targets on the business case and the project outcome.
• Relational KSAE– High levels of capacity to build trust and confidence that people can voice their opinions, perspectives and ideas and that these contributions are valued.

Reinforcing the need for independent and critical thinkers who have the courage and sprit to provide challenge assumptions and open divergent thinking.

Intrepeneurs, yeah. So they were seen as mavericks, but they were playing with these issues of value, so the idea of public value versus private value, and so they opened themselves up as explorers, but they also opened themselves up as threats to the organisation.

…you needed to have people at the senior level sufficiently enlightened to be able to say, “Well, if we're going to achieve and extraordinary result, and we need to achieve an extraordinary result to make this program, we can't do it in the same way we've done these things before.”

And so the guy, just around about 40, basically after [XXX alliance], his career just took off. He had a lot of courage. Another thing that really stuck in my mind with working with him, he made the suggestion that, “I think this is the right thing for my industry, I think it's the right thing for my company. If my company don't approve of me, they can sack me. Let's do it”

On an interesting aspect of timidity and reticence, as opposed to courage and spirit, by A10

…but the body language; which was what was used to measure in this case, was very defensive and it looked - and I didn't analyse the—it was filmed; the evidence was filmed. I didn't sift through the evidence but what my colleague suggested was that they were defensive, as if to protect their professional standing. Not quite the same as reputation but they wanted to protect their professional position and stance; standing in the team, rather than necessarily contributing to what was best for the team or the coalition as a whole.

Project participants demonstrate qualities of being approachable and trustworthy and open to ideas. They encourage and advance collaboration, discussion, and new ways of thinking. This is impacted upon by the national and organisational culture within which the project is delivered as well as by the characteristics of the various project team participants.

• Project team participants mindfully behaving in a way that demonstrates that they have considered their actions’ impact on others.
• Project team participants appearing genuinely enthusiastic about achieving best-for-project outcomes.
• Project team participants being trustworthy and effective in championing collaboration.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having sufficient technical and PM baseline KSAE to be accepted and respected.
• Business solutions KSAE– Understanding the impact of authentic leadership on the business case and the project outcome.
• Relational KSAE– High levels of capacity to build trust and confidence in people to enable the building of mutual trust and respect.

Reflecting on the competitive dialogue approach that illustrates the need of the POR to be, or at least appear to be, authentic when negotiating with competing project delivery teams. A01 says:

The tension between transparency and competition and trying that indeed some confidential information about that you as a party work on certain innovations come in public, that's really, that's a problem…. The supplying parties do not give complete transparency because of the fear that, yes, that they will give some of their innovations away.

Examples of national and workplace culture influences on perception of authenticity and trust, as expressed by A02 and A16:

Because what we have here is you also have a working culture where there's not so much distance between superiors and the people who do the work….the transport administration, the infrastructure projects they have, they have projects with Swedish contractors and with German contractors primarily. And they say that there is a big difference in dealing with the Germans…. because Swedish, we have a consensus culture which can be extremely frustrating for other people and sometimes also for Swedes as well. But there are so many discussions and everybody has to agree. But what happens in those discussions, they take an endless long time, but after a decision is reached it's generally agreed upon by people and it's implemented, while perhaps if you make a decision at an early, somebody high up in the organisation makes a decision at an early stage, you then have to kind of communicate and sell it within the organisation. So it's kind of, so they said that [German contractor X] got angry at the [Swedish project owner authority Y] and they say that you want discussions, discussions, discussions, and we want decisions, decisions, decisions.

You realise quite early, after a few months, that we need to be humble and we need to have a dialogue with everyone and need to spend time on creating a good working relation, not just between [Swedish project owner authority A] and [Swedish contractor B] within the project organisation, but with every subcontractor, because they are representing us with the land owners.

On organisational and professional group cultures, A10 said:

Whether it really did or not, the actors thought that where emotional intelligence was higher, there were greater levels of collaboration and again, [UK PO A] have this pro-collaborative approach. And so, in particular, one of the two contractors was much better at collaborative working in terms of displaying emotional intelligence than the other one. The client [UK PO A] were pretty good on some dimensions but not very good on others; for example, transparency. The engineers were actually pretty lousy at it. They were actually quite a negative factor, which is perhaps not what one would think from an engineer; particularly from that engineer, but it was the case.

On balancing being open and collaborative and shielding others from information that may have a temporary but not permanent negative effect in order to maintain trust and collaboration within and between teams, P21 said:

I think so and it's not about being secretive or manipulative, when you were saying before about patience and then one things that I've really learnt is to shut up on some things they're not actually—sometimes you've got to let things play out a bit and that's sort of been the way I've always managed and behaved, but you need to let things play out a little longer.

The behavioural contract in PAs can contribute to a climate of trust and collaboration, as P28 stated:

I got called a few times, we're building a bloody big complex project and there's always going to be robust discussions and a lot of heat in these discussions, but as long as people are respectful of the other people's opinion, acknowledge it and are willing to listen. The charter of the behaviours which come out are the most important things, so calling behaviours is very important.