Being relied upon to have the capacity to make agreements or to take agreed action can be enhanced or constrained by the cultural context, governance requirements, and perceptions of each party's power and influence.

• Project team participants mindfully demonstrating consideration of their and others’ constraints or opportunities to make commitments and deliver on promises.
• Project team participants understanding the nature and limits of each other's power and influence.
• Project team participants’ capacity to renegotiate their level of autonomy in terms of a trust and control balance perspective.
• Project team participants being able to initiate scope changes based on changes in information relating to value achievable from any scope or scale changes.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having sufficient technical and PM KSAE to understand their limits of autonomy or capacity to negotiate changes in autonomy within the project procurement context with particular attention to an holistic workplace safety perspective.
• Business solutions KSAE – Understanding the purpose and logic of their present level of autonomy in terms of the situational business dynamics.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of capacity to build and maintain trust and confidence in people to enhance mutual trust and respect.

Participant A02 reflects on cultural implications of autonomy due to power distance and collectivism dimensions. In particular, culture within infrastructure sectors is illustrated (see Table 3 in Chapter 4).

…another issue is that the German people have to go back to their bosses all the time and ask for permission about everything, while Swedish people can be more, kind of, they can make decisions and they can check, perhaps check afterwards or they have kind of, they have some autonomy to make decisions on their own based on their expert areas. So it's easier, shorter decision routes in the Swedish culture. But what's interesting is that also the Germans when they have been working in these projects, they think that it is a very good way of working, so they perceive it as a way of working which is much better than their traditional way, and they are able to adapt, it just takes a bit longer time for them. So it's not impossible.

…they have a tradition, especially I think in the road area, not so much in the rail—they are more centralised—but in the road area it's very decentralised so you can't really tell any road person what to do. They want to decide for themselves…

On relating to the issue of gaining autonomy through a PA to be able to make commitments supported by the governance system and the organisation's hierarchy to make scope changes that achieve better project outcomes, P23 and P34 say:

I guess one of the big advantages of having the alliance was that we had an alliance manager who had to become intimately familiar with the whole M&E scope and what the challenges were for the M&E team, etc., and had some influence in the project management, the bigger project, and had some influence in what they did. Whereas [Participant X] is the subcontractor wouldn't be able to influence the civil work at all, the alliance manager was able to influence it in some ways to the benefit of the alliance, for the M&E scope.

So we were directed not to—I know, I know—we extended the scope of the project. So the project stopped at, you know, chainage zero say, and that out beyond chainage zero there was a couple of hundred metres of really poor alignment and bridge that probably didn't have much more than 10 years in it. So we sort of felt pretty strongly about it all, what's the point of delivering 110 kilometre-an-hour facility, with 100-year design life bridges, and 40-year design life pavement, and butt it up to something that's going to be dead in 10 years. So we suggested the client that we ought to do that, and [we] did. And that was pretty good going because that was fairly late in the process, and we needed to really hustle, so we did concurrent design construction, and that gave the designers a headache and the constructors a headache, but it was just something that needed to happen.

Project participants’ trust in their leaders and vice versa is often mediated by perceived procurement forms. This perception forms the basis of that trust together with evaluation of self-interest and shared interest and appreciation of the nature of that interest.

• Understanding how various project procurement forms either assume or specify accountability and transparency “behavioural” requirements of trust for the project procurement context. Understanding that self-interest trust with legal and highly procedural control mechanisms reinforce that trust concept and may operate in one context, while social trust may better apply in another in which norms and longer-term reputational impact is more salient.
• Appreciating the various underlying concepts of what trust means so that project participants can share a common understanding of what differences in meaning can be attributed to trust.
• Project team participants accepting the validity of trust-with-caution as being a valid balance of unreservedly expecting the other party(ies) to deliver on commitments and basing their accountability monitoring requirements with inflexibly demanding adherence to signed contract conditions.

• Technical and PM KSAE – Having high levels of understanding and knowledge of the concept of behaviour trust and verification through accountability and its implications for the project procurement form as an effective governance measure.
• Business solutions KSAE – Having high levels of ability to respond appropriately to the trust-control balance specified or implied by the procurement form to achieve long term business success.
• Relational KSAE – Having high levels of interpersonal KSAE needed to match social interaction with the appropriate behaviours to generate and maintain trust.

Relating to the nature of and basis for trust, and potential opportunistic behaviours to illustrate the need to understand participants interest and motivation, A10, P06, and P23 state that:

…if each party's looking at their own interest. If I trust you, I'm going to get something out of it. If you trust me, you're going to get something out of it. We sense that's what's going to go on and then we get a classic win-win…Ultimately, in self-interested trust you'll get classic win-win. In contrast to game theory, an enhanced level of trust is more of the social orientation, where you say, “Well if I look after the interests of the other party, I will benefit from that; either in the short or in the long run.” So you're not looking first of all at your own interests. You're looking at their interest first and then you hope, you believe, and that's the level of vulnerability, if you like; you believe that it's possible that they will look after yours. You don't know that they will and it's then a question of collecting the evidence through iterative exchanges and through iterative contact in relationships to see whether that's what's happening. Now all the companies I interviewed [across the spectrum of procurement forms, including PA-like forms] were looking at trust in terms of self-interested trust. None had really gone to socially orientated trust at all [refer to Chapter 4 for types of trust theoretical discussion].

…my thought has mainly been from the inside of those relationships but there's the external aspect; those looking from the outside, those excluded from those relationships. Is that a good thing? And is it, even though it may be good for the project, is it good over a programme of projects, over a framework? We don't know. No one's looked at that, so that would be the first point about an omission; an area that hasn't really been considered.

The biggest issue of all of this is when the contractor wants to maximise his return on any project he's dealing with, and that's what you're also fighting against.

…the main contractor is really only interested in the date and wants whatever resources are necessary to be thrown on the project, whereas the M&E subcontractor has to protect their position and make sure that they can show a profit at the end of the day. So therefore they're lining up, recording bullets that they could fire, etc., to make sure they don't fall way behind on the financial side.

Contrasting opportunistic behaviour with positive trust aspects on an extremely complex Nordic project characterised by high collaboration levels under uncertainty A16 says:

And when I did some of the interviews in the beginning with a few of the guys working, they said, “To be honest, we don't really know what it's all about, but we trust them, so hope it works out.”

Project participants’ trust in their leaders is often mediated by their perceived treatment in terms of a working in a safe psychological, physical, and intellectual environment. All infrastructure engineering projects have an emphasis on a physically safe workplace but a safe psychological and intellectual workplace is also essential to foster trust and innovation.

• Understanding that a physically safe workplace culture emphasises the importance of not exposing people to risk of physical injury.
• Understanding that a psychologically safe workplace culture emphasises the importance of not exposing people to risk of feeling inferior, inhibited, and constrained in a particular behavioural direction.
• Understanding that an intellectually safe workplace culture emphasises the importance of allowing people to challenge ideas and to offer even crazy suggestions that could be refined and developed, so it inhibits inhibition to experiment and make mistakes that can be learnt from.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding and knowledge of the implications of technology and methods on potential risk of injury.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of physical, psychological and intellectual health of workplace environments to achieving long term business success.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE to communicate and influence others about the value of creating and maintaining appropriate behaviours to balance trust and control of the workplace environmental conditions.

Concern for employees’ health and well-being on-site has been well established to encourage employees on-site to trust their employers to not cause them physical harm. This has been extended to office workers for the same reason, and as P28 states:

The focus on safety is something I've never seen before, we set benchmarks in safety, we'll work that in the training or putting people through those trainings. I'm 40 years in the game and I've been used to dropping off onsite and walking up and down where you feel like it. Those days are gone, you've got to sign on, sign off…

The safe spine initiative, I don't know if you heard of that one where they do all the exercises and things. Before people start work in the morning they do 10 minutes of stretching exercises and they do them at the end of evening, or just after lunch and things like that.

Relating to the nature of psychological workplace safety, two quotes illustrate different aspects. In the first, A10 discussed power relationships and supportive safe collaborative environments, and in the second, P34 talks about a potential sexual harassment situation.

[Organisation X] and that was about trust or the lack of it between the project sponsors and the project managers and there were quite low levels of trust between those two roles; the people occupying those roles in that organisation. And they have a project management framework that's supposed to again, facilitate collaborative working with their contractors. Well if you haven't got high levels of trust internally, it's going to be very difficult to inject good levels of trust to facilitate collaborative working with your contractors, so they may be a strong client in some ways but they're weak in that way for sure.

…and I warned him once, twice, and the third time I said no. And as it turned out, he was one of the corridor gossipers as well, he and another girl who was on the AMT, would put around all sorts of weird and wonderful rumours and stories, and just crap, outside the AMT. And I guess I—you know, I guess we all turned a blind-eye to it, but didn't realise that the problem there was how the AMT was perceived by the rest of the team, like the wider team, and these people were representing poorly to the wider team. So we needed to correct that and correct it quickly, and we did. A number of things happened that made—get corrected.

Intellectual safety to be able to creatively think and express ideas as a contribution is critical to innovation. A09 in discussing this aspect of trust to be different states:

I think the solution lies in design thinking, because 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.

Project participants’ and their POR engage in varying levels of effort in creating a balance in trust and control in which trust with caution is tempered with blind faith. Trust relationship building requires thinking about the types of trust as well as creating safe environments.

• Establishing protocols and culturally acceptable norms through a behavioural charter so that people understand what the norms are.
• Actively establishing processes and training to strengthen people skills to allow people to understand each other's perspective.
• Rewarding high relationship building and maintenance mechanisms being effectively deployed.
• Demonstrating integrity and ethical dealing to support confidence in building sound relationships between and within project teams.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding of tools and techniques for building trust across and within teams.
• Business solutions KSAE – Participants need high levels of understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of various trust building approaches and how that impacts upon business success.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal and cultural appreciation KSAE are needed to effectively deploy and maintain relationship building processes.

Participant A01 stated in relation to the Competitive Dialogue process, an aspect that related to integrity and ethics in terms of dealing confidentially with bidding parties that is salient to the nature of trust building that:

So in principle the information given to one party, to one supplying party, you have to give to the other supplying party but there is discretion by giving certain information to one supplying party, also we said - what's the English word? You also give maybe certain - what do you call it? Certain confidential information because when you answer a certain question of this party, you may be also - and make it transparent that you answered this question and give this answer - you also maybe give some information to other parties about what type of innovation they're working on.

And others interviewed contributed comments that are salient to behaviours that support trust.

As I said, it was a code of behaviour really about how you were going to work together and it would always return to that T5 Agreement if there were any debates or any problems that arose. The emergence complexity, well, partly the reimbursable contracts dealt with that, so you've got unexpected things happening but they'd still pay you what it costs to sort those out.

Well, you've got to bear in mind that the guangxi works in China in a command economy. It's all about policy drives decision-making or whatever, whereas in Japan it's still actually—you would describe it as an open or market economy. So within the market economy, these relationships make, if you like, business much easier, much simpler, do you understand?

Well, there is an amount of trust, but a lot of people go into these relationships and you might call it trust, but also in many cases it's blind faith and not really thinking it through, because the individuals involved at that stage, their focus, they'll be heroes if they win the job, then they're out of it. And so, they'll do whatever they want to do to try and win the job, then it's somebody else's problem when they've won the job to make it work. That's a heightened risk when you're building in as part of your bid your half-billion-dollar alliance that relies on your delicate network of relationships to make it work properly, and you don't even know who's going to be involved in those relationships.

And in relationship to trust building throughout the project delivery phase:

We did a lot of work with coaching and mentoring and did a lot of health checks, especially early and just seeing how the health was going, we spent especially the combined AMT/ALT going through those surveys with a fair bit of rigour just to try and see what the issues are.

I'm really impressed with the way people get out of their normal organisational roles into a team environment with strangers, they've quickly formed strong relationships and they're sharing information and work with each other very well to get the very best outcomes for the project objective.

Well yeah, forming relationships, maintaining relationships, understanding that a relationship doesn't look after itself, you have to actually work at it, ensuring that you're recognising performance and rewarding performance, making sure that other people within your relationship are aware of people's performance and the effect on those people of those rewards, so encouraging better performance, so all of those things go to a more self-aware team.

Project participants need to understand and adapt to behavioural expectations associated with different types of innovation (product, process, or behavioural) within a project or programme situational context that may affect how team members’ commitment can be initiated and sustained.

• Project participants understand that various project procurement approaches assume or specify specific “behavioural” that directs or at least strongly influences their capacity and motivation to initiate and sustain innovation. PAs and programme alliances have firmer and more specific behavioral contract clauses that require collaboration, whereas other forms of RPB such as partnering set aspirational agreements and expectations without firm measures of innovation or rewards for innovation.
• Project participants have a sophisticated and deep understanding of underlying concepts of drivers and inhibitors of innovation.
• Project team participants understand that innovation can be initiated across the project life cycle from project definition to project handover, and how forms of collaborative engagement can be designed to be quarantined to specific phases, for example, with ECI forms and design, project and programme alliances.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical understanding of the process and required behaviours of innovation and its diffusion in terms of procurement choice.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of the drivers and inhibitors of innovation, understanding business process, and how to identify value chains, and how innovation may impact long-term business success.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE to communicate and influence others about creating workplace environmental conditions required to enhance commitment for innovation and effective continuous improvement.

The Competitive Dialogue requires short-listed contractors to consider innovative approaches to the design and construction of a facility to be effective in both the short and long term. As A01 states:

…also it was more also about how do you organise your maintenance programme, what type of asphalt would you use, what—that was a very important issue for the ministry for how many maintenance days, what's the planning of your maintenance in relation to the type of asphalt that you use on the road; is it under—do you put some asphalt on the road and do you have only 1–10 years sort of big maintenance project or each year a few days maintenance. That trade-offs—that was very important because it was one of the major and ambitious tunnels in Netherlands so the number of days that it would be closed or how did you organise the maintenance of this tunnel during the next 30 years was a very important issue during this procurement issue and discussion.

Use of BIM as an innovation was shown to be readily accepted in this illustration that hints at cultural factors that influence innovation motivation that were discussed in detail in Chapter 4. A07's quote also shows how liberating this [person] found the innovation to be and how that motivated him.

Finnish people…are very quiet people normally, but one thing that I notice is they're very open to any kind of new solutions and this chap has never criticised anything that he was using. He said this is wonderful, it's got its own limitations and so on and so on, but actually it has enabled me to do this and that and he was demonstrating on a construction site how he can order with the click of a mouse a component that is going to be installed where they were building the new coffee roasting factory and it automatically triggered the whole supply chain to actually produce that component.

This next example illustrates the thought processes behind the decision to use a PA approach on a project they studied in depth and how that project required rethinking how to measure performance and how it required a specific workplace culture. The second quote illustrates an innovation developed out of that project. As A09 states:

And you are seeing this sort of idea of design thinking, which is quite common now, this idea or concept of design thinking, but you are seeing the design thinking applied to an organisation or to a social problem. Essentially, how are we going to meet the Olympics, how are we going to clean the harbour up in time and build a 20km tunnel when our closest estimates where we took seven years to do a similar project in California? And how are we going to involve a complex array of stakeholders, give them a say in how it's designed but no accountability? And so it went against all the ideas of…resource-base, views of the firm, if you look at those sorts of ideas, it went against all those ideas that you collaborate to reduce uncertainty. Because 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.

Yeah, process innovation, but also product innovation. The invention of, you know, a CAD system where they were different colour-coded lines representing gas pipes, water pipes, electricity pipes and so on. So typically you'd have like a radio that would go over them, where they developed a system that could tell the difference between the three. And this is the innovation through that project. You know, totally reducing the level of dust from cutting concrete, for example, one of the most riskiest parts of construction…

Another great innovation which has gone global is trenchless technology, so trenchless drilling…It's a little tunnel outside people's houses so you don't disrupt the community. So people can get in and out of their houses, you don't block the road, and you just pop it down one side, it comes out the other end, then…so they developed those sorts of technologies. And this came out through their commitment to their KPIs to community, for example. So those KPIs didn't just become ways of managing or control, they became points of innovation they got you to think differently about what you do.

Other examples from more RBP types follow:

You had incentives to innovate so if you did things faster or quicker or better than the benchmarking, then you could make more profit. Adjusting time logistics also helped this emergence stuff. So if there was any problem that arose, you could deal with it by not putting those stuff on-site and stopping other work being done.

And they're trying to do that but the thing was it worked really well in summer time, but as fast—as soon as it got a bit cold it didn't work. So they tried a few different alternatives, and they had that one and they had another big machine that they shipped over and tried…

And also, actually, having the flexibility to work around obstacles. So there was quite a lot of ad hoc discussion with land owners.

…commitment to innovate, that is, I would say, partly a behavioural thing, but partly a process or routine driver thing. That's my understanding. For example, if we take this trying to find innovative ways of using other types of machines, this chain saw thing, that was—they tried to establish that from more a normative way of top-down decision of, “Well, let's found processes to make this more effective and implement this.” And that was an agreement between the partners. But when it wasn't fruitful for the project as a whole, and the subcontractors didn't really think, “Well, why should we use this?” It wasn't really part of the behavioural factors. I think - I would say that this is more a bottom-up driven thing, and this is more a top-down, or possible to implement more top-down.

It's, you know, smart design. So examples would be like a pump station usually has a round wet well and then a valve chamber on the outside. The designs have come up with sort of integrates that all into one sort of construction rather than two separate ones. So that generates savings. Other examples are [utility organisation X] up to this point has only built steel tanks. We've sort of really challenged the standards and brought in concrete tanks and, you know, saving millions of dollars on projects that way sort of thing. So challenging standards is another area as well.

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. Motivating to achieve continuous improvement depends upon institutional, governance, and individual motivational and enabling factors.

• Project participants understand that effective sustainability can only be achieved through continuous improvement and having sound mechanisms to capture and diffuse innovation from lessons learnt.
• Project participants have a sophisticated and deep understanding of underlying concepts of what drives or inhibits continuous improvement.
• Project team participants deeply understand and can adopt and adapt mechanisms for encouraging the diffusion of continuous improvement.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical understanding of tools and processes and how these can be continuously improved and how these impact upon and are impacted by other project systems and project external systems.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of driver and inhibitor processes for continuous improvement and how innovation impacts long term business success.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE are needed to communicate and influence others about the workplace environmental conditions required to enhance commitment for effective continuous improvement and its diffusion.

P29 made a point about continuously improving KRAs and KPIs as form of process innovation, continuous improvement. He also illustrates how continuous improvement is also a balance of discarding processes, after duly considering their context, that fail to deliver value, and as he states:

To me, that's one of the key learning's out of our whole alliance and unfortunately we're not going to get to do another one. To me that's where the real value could be added to anyone else going down the alliance path. We spent a lot of time and brainpower improving those KPIs to something that really means something.

To give you an example, it specified that when all these different management plan documents had to be put together and we soon realised that they didn't actually add any value, and yet we'd paid for them so very much we were on the process mapping path and that has been much more effective. So the alliance is extremely good for delivering the programme.

Use of value engineering as a continuous improvement tool was discussed by P23

On this project, there were value engineering workshops and the like where they were constantly looking for better ways to deliver the project, and those workshops would involve alliance team members and people outside the alliance because it was often the situation where you were trying to find the best solution, project-wise—not necessarily just best for the alliance - but best for the overall project.

And on continuous improvement through learning on similar elements in a tunnel fit out PA, P22 observed that:

Two things happened, I suppose. One is there's a natural learning curve anyway on these projects, there always is. Irrespective of whether it's an alliance or any other delivery method, it's just a matter of fact that when you have 30 repetitive processes, obviously later on you work out how to do it. And they had put an awful lot of thought, an awful lot of pre-planning, into how they were going to pre-fabricate and do all sorts of things to try and advance the program. In the subsequent section of the eastern section, and certainly the central section, they managed to achieve quite remarkable program gains there in order to bring it in when they did, and I just can't see with a traditional form of contract they would have ever got there in the time they did.

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

• Project participants understand the value of trial and error and are not inhibited, by the project governance system or workplace cultural norms, to experiment.
• Project participants have a sophisticated and deep level scientific approach to effectively experiment with prototypes and simulations.
• Project team participants have the capacity that when it appears to be appropriate, they can argue for, and influence, an argument for experimentation.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding project systems and project external systems and the technology involved in prototyping and modelling.
• Business solutions KSAE – Participants need high levels of understanding limitations of a model versus the “real” situation and context and how this impacts upon long-term business success.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE are needed to communicate and influence others to support experimentation.

A02 drew attention to the value of adapting existing knowledge while designing new processes in an experimental fashion. She says:

But this city tunnel project they say that now it was important for us to develop our own guidelines. Because if you are involved in developing something you learn it, yes and then it implements itself, instead of taking something that somebody else has developed and train people in it. They prefer to do it the other way round.

A09 comments about common managerial attitudes to perceived risk of experimenting.

And it comes down to the issues of improvisation, you know. But see, there's an interesting…whenever you talk about improvisation, if you go into a company and talk about improvisation – which I do a lot – they think you're crazy, because what they think is what you're talking about is letting go of everything you know.

A13 made some interesting points about the T5 project. British Airports had a distinct policy of not trying something new, yet they required subcontractors to do a lot of off-site prototyping to experiment with potential new (in terms of scale and complexity) approaches and products.

So they proved in these experiments that you could put a car park in there, put a car park in there, put a car park in there using the same design. The idea was design once, build many times and then you'd get improvements in terms of productivity and in terms of cost. They did lots of this pre-assembly, they tried these things before, pre-off-site testing and as I mentioned before they had this policy of not adopting untested technologies and that was one of the problems with the reporting of it. They said “This is another one of those IT disasters because they've just introduced this big bang IT system” but actually it wasn't true. They had been tested elsewhere before they were put in here.

The fifth element of this, off-site pre-assembly tests. Because of this problem about one entrance and the restrictions getting onto the site and no laydown space, they had to come up with alternative arrangements and what they did they created off-site two consolidation areas. One at Colnbrook where they had a railway line going in bringing steel, concrete, and a lot of prefabrication of all the steel and concrete cages and prefabricated concrete panels, which were then brought onto site already partly manufactured. The other part of that was testing, because you didn't want to have unexpected things happen on the constructionsite you'd test the method of construction off-site before you brought anything on-site. So again it's about learning. Make your mistakes off-site so when you come on-site you can do things right. And the last element in this system was the adjusted time logistics and again this is really to deal with this problem of having no laydown areas and having just one entrance to the thing.

Project participants need to be effectively collaborating to a constructive end by sharing commonly aligned best-for-project goals and how that delivers best value. The project outturn cost (the end of project cost) should represent best value to meet profit and other benefit expectations of participants to motivate and set a culture of collaboration to those ends.

• Project participants understand the value and limitations of commonly aligned goals and how to achieve that alignment in both explicit and implicit terms.
• Project participants realise that goals are context-constrained and are that they are not afraid to challenge, review, and recalibrate goals when the context changes.
• Project team participants deeply understand the process of developing and recalibration of goals (as expressed as KRAs and KPIs) and realignment when this process is required.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding of tools and processes and how to review and influence goal recalibration.
• Business solutions KSAE – Participants need high levels of understanding of the purpose and limitations of goals and their alignment impacts upon long term business success.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE are needed to communicate and influence others about their own goals that may need to be reviewed and recalibrated to be aligned with those of the project's aims and goals. PORs, in particular, need to understand the motivational and commercial drivers of participants and the strengths and weaknesses of their organisational culture.

The fundamental purpose of the whole project requires goals to be fully understood and to be aligned with how the project can be actually delivered. P17 makes a point about process performance that is elaborated upon in the following quote. P20 comments on best-for-project culture and thinking, and P29 comments on refining and clarifying common goal aspects.

…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….one of the key conversations that we had in setting this up was that exact issues that just arose is about the scope of work, and back at the start we talked at length about that in one of the workshops, about why limit this to the mech and elec. And what we did is we actually opened it up so that the scope of the target cost included the civil works to be carried out by [participant 1 and 2]. That was one of the little breakthroughs we had in the commercial setup.

…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.

It's a lot easier getting information and all working together, so I've got to say that's been an extremely positive experience and there's been no—I can honestly say I haven't seen any sort of real drivers to produce fat TOCs, fat target outturn costs that gives more gain share to the designer and to the contractor. I think what actually happens with a programme alliance is after awhile you work out the sweet spot in terms of what is really going to meet everyone's expectations, and you all work toward that and that has been very positive.

These should be assessed, judged and be based upon agreed common best-for-project aligned goals. Performance is a multidimensional concept, and each project has its own drivers and context that influences the balance of output and outcome measures. Once realistically usable measures are in place, they can be linked to performance monitoring, decision making, and incentivisation arrangements. It's important to think of performance holistically.

• Project participants understand the value of not just what was asked for by the POR but by what the POR found difficulty in articulating and what the POR actually meant to ask for.
• Project participants understand how to effectively elicit information from the POR to clarify and explore aspects of the project business case and brief to clarify ambiguous or uncertain stated output and outcome requirements.
• Project team participants deeply understand the process of developing and recalibrating goals (as expressed as KRAs and KPIs) to enable effective performance targets to be set that are express best-for-project outputs and outcomes.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding tools and processes and how to review and influence refinement of the brief to squeeze out as much uncertainty and ambiguity as possible to lay foundations for excellent best-for-project decision making.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of the purpose and limitations of goals and their alignment impacts upon long term business success.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE to communicate and influence others about how to develop a best-for-project culture.

Outcomes and outputs are different concepts. Project outputs can be more tangible and thus more easily recognised and measured. Outcomes imply longer term impact and a broader set of end-states. This can include what the POR did not ask for but really wanted. Articulating these to enable linking them to success measures is important. P34 discusses some of these wider articulated outcomes as well as outputs, and P30 provides a quote about how a PA delivered better results than could have been achieved using a different procurement approach.

It was very clear that they had a safety concern, they had traffic flow concern, they had connectivity and stakeholder concerns, as well as design integration with maintenance concerns, so they were basically the five KRAs.

But very loose in the document, well enough defined, it was clear that that was their intent, they needed performance in those areas. And then the evolution of the KPIs associated with each of those KRAs, yeah it took—I don't know how many alliance guys you've talked to, but you can spend a long time with the detail of the KPIs, and I guess we spent a fair bit on [PA X], and realised, you know, we nearly got to the end of the project before we actually defined what it was we were measuring. So on [PA Y] we spent probably six months, the first six months, when we weren't really building much anyway, we were just basically preparing design and doing a bit of early works, and then about at the end of six months, they'd evolved enough that we said “Right, stop, that's what they're going to be, we'll measure them like that.” And I think there might have been a couple of tweaks during the four years, but they weren't significant tweaks. They were just some oh shit moments where we thought; oh we're not measuring that properly because of such and such. So yeah, they evolved fairly quickly and became quite stable quite early.

I mean think about what it is you're trying to achieve and mitigate the risk as best you can and the way it's progressing there is that we did achieve the objective at getting started early and we have delivered almost in slightly under the target out turn cost—less than one per cent I think is how it's shaping up under target out turn cost—and we've achieved all the things that were expected in the scope of the work and with huge traffic management challenges on that project as you'd expect, and it's something that we underbid actually. The traffic management has turned out to be a lot more expensive than we all thought. Now in a design and construct environment, you can see what could happen, couldn't you? The contractor is facing these huge bills for traffic management then you start cutting corners and they start switching off listening to the client who is persisting about the importance of continuing to manage traffic as efficiently as we possibly can but they'll just switch off. I hear you but I'm sorry I'm bleeding over here, I can't deliver on excellent traffic management. That's what tends to happen in a D&C procurement model. I'm really pleased again to hear that the alliance model has been able to achieve the client's objective and the alliance partners have made a reasonable financial gain out of it but not over the top.

Project participants’ within a PA context are required to be constantly challenging their level of outcome and performance through effective collaboration toward a constructive evaluation of achieved outcomes and performance. This provides a fission of uncertainty because it encourages project leaders to keep raising the bar of expectations of team performance and what can be achieved while team members use a bottom-up approach through reflecting upon and questioning assumptions and work approaches to rise above business-as-usual expectations. The PA approach can be contrasted with lower levels of project design and delivery collaboration intensity, where the main focus is on providing what was specifically requested.

• Project participants understand the value of reflection on assumptions underpinning work methods and design elements. They contemplate and act upon how to achieve continuous improvement and innovation that generates sustainable outcome improvement.
• Project participants understand the distinction between efficiency and effectiveness, product and service, output and outcome. They also can distinguish between unnecessary “gold-plating” and “lean” project outputs and find a realistic balance in their approach.
• Project team participants effectively apply a process of developing and recalibrating goals (as expressed as KRAs and KPIs) to improve best-for-project outputs and outcomes.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding of tools and processes and how to review and influence accepted BAU approaches to lay foundations for excellent best-for-project decision making and action taking.
• Business solutions KSAE – Participants need high levels of understanding of the purpose and limitations of goals and to avoid unnecessary “gold-plated” solutions or needlessly “lean” ones that may have driven out requisite variety for innovation.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE are needed to inspire and influence others about how to develop a best-for-project culture through challenging for excellence.

Challenging assumptions to be innovate has its risks if it is not within a culture that protects challenging orthodoxy and rewarding innovation. The Competitive Dialogue (CD) process and dual TOC PAs suffer the same risks in terms of exposing very bright ideas before being officially accepted as being part of the project team. As A01 discussed in relation to a CD situation:

…one of the very radical ideas but it was so radical that they were afraid that certain dialogue information would become public that that type of process—well you call it, is it innovation—but that approach would become, yes, would become public for the other parties, for the competitors.

And also it was more also about how do you organise your maintenance programme, what type of asphalt would you use, what—that was a very important issue for the ministry for how many maintenance days, what's the planning of your maintenance in relation to the type of asphalt that you use on the road; is it under—do you put some asphalt on the road and do you have only 1–10 years sort of big maintenance project or each year a few days maintenance? That trade-offs—that was very important because it was one of the major and ambitious tunnels in Netherlands so the number of days that it would be closed or how did you organise the maintenance of this tunnel during the next 30 years was a very important issue during this procurement issue and discussion.

Being prepared to challenge assumptions and offer radical ideas has its own constraints. In terms of needing political and well as technical skills, A09 made a good point that is similar to P21's observation on a very different project context:

…the one thing I can see that was really strong is this desire to do something different, and the willingness for people to take on significant battles, even to their own detriment. To put a number on it - and I'm not saying this is what it is, but just to put a number—I would say 80% of the battle is political, and we don't pay enough attention in projects…

I've experienced it, but being right in the middle of it and constantly being confronted by things that you need to try and correct in terms of an architect's view of the world and how things should operate and the builders view of the world and how things should operate. It's tough but I think that we are able, traditionally in projects I know—theatre buildings and theatres and renovations of theatres—is that areas that suffer the most are the end product which is actually the operational capacity of the building which actually delivers the product and they're the things that are most easily cut, and so I've worked with a lot of people in this project to make sure that that hasn't happened so we're going to come out with a really good technical result for the staging and a really good result in things operational relating to food and beverage and things like that.

Project participants’ need to devise ways to recognise, monitor, and effectively diffuse knowledge about how their performance and workplace culture has impacted value for money on their project or programme.

• Project participants understand the distinction between cost and value and therefore how to best frame stakeholders’ value proposition in what really counts as value for them.
• Project participants understand the how stakeholders may visualise value for money (VfM) so that they can articulate it an explicit and unambiguous way.
• Project team participants effectively apply a process of reporting in a meaningful yet simple way best-for-project outputs and outcomes that clearly identify VfM.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding of tools and processes and how to identify, measure, and communicate VfM.
• Business solutions KSAE – Participants need high levels of understanding of the purpose and limitations of influential project stakeholders’ value proposition that leads to effectively articulating VfM in terms that these stakeholders can understand.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE are needed to effectively identify, define and communicate VfM in terms that influential stakeholders can understand.

Reporting VfM entails more than dryly cataloguing how the project has delivered benefits that are appreciated, valued, and “count.” It requires an element of inspirational communication to develop a reporting format that motivates influential stakeholders to fully recognise what has been delivered. However, there still seems to be difficulty in the POR and NOPs identifying specific VfM examples to adequately demonstrate this element of success. Two aspects of VfM reporting emerged from the data.
One set of quotes relates to initial business case justification of VfM. Envisaging VfM is sometimes captured by KRAs and operationalised through KPIs.

The value for money case here was reducing congestion, improving traffic flows, reducing the poor safety record, or improving the poor safety record. You know, realignments that were more—that suited the traffic, I guess better, because what was there before was pretty ordinary.

…improving access provisions, so all of those things go to the value—statement of value I guess, but [client/owner X] trying to encapsulate that in a statement, well no, not really. We prepared a quarterly value for money report, and we reported—and I haven't gone through all the elements of value, but they were probably the main ones. And we'd report on how we were going against each of them, comparing that to the business case that [client/owner X] put together to justify the project.

…when we're dealing with the public sector, everyone is walking on eggshells about value for money and probity, et cetera, and what I find in the private sector is people make much more rapid decisions and they're far more empowered; if they think that they'll get the best deal by negotiating on a sole-source basis with one player, that's what they'll do

…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.

once you've made a decision in that selection then it's a priority consideration in the selection because they all lead to the value for money, how you manage your risk, how do you manage the scope, how you manage your time. To me, that's the end of the argument or the discussion because in selecting that form of delivery you have picked the best value-for-money delivery method. I know later we put up value-for-money reports and things like that, but to me, when they talk about value for money, once the decision's been made which form of delivery you use to me that's the end of the discussion, but some people don't agree with me.

The second aspect is about post-project or during-project VfM reporting that may be undertaken to articulate broad VfM results.

…there's also a requirement that when you reach practical completion of your alliances that the client needs to prepare a value-for-money report to demonstrate what has been achieved. With doing that, I've been reflecting on my experience that these sort of reports tend to pop out at the end of the alliance work when teams are being disbanded and the knowledge capture is extremely difficult because all those with the wisdom about the value that we've delivered, have departed. So trying to bring it all together and collated to form a great value-for-money report becomes very problematic. And I've been saying to the recent alliances that I'm in and they get it, and six months out before the end I really made an issue of it, and I get lots of people promising me that we're in the throes of developing and we've got a framework and we've drafted something up, and I keep saying “I want to see it,” guess what happens? It doesn't come. It's a low priority from the team's perspective and again becomes a very difficult task at the end to pull it together. Having said that, though, the quality of the value-for-money reports is improving. Some years ago there wasn't a requirement, I don't think, to prepare value-for-money statements, although treasuries now ask from us a report on value for money for each of the alliances we've undertaken.

So we're in the process of collating these value for money reports and feeding them up to treasury who I'm sure will go through them very closely and be coming back with lots of questions about who decided to make this change event? Who gave authority for this? Why did you need to have this change event? All those sorts of questions I'm sure will come back. Now that doesn't worry me because we've got processes here with all of our contracts that with delegations of authority, you cannot change scope of work without getting approval of the chief executive. In variations you've always got to put a value-for-money statement in there, to demonstrate that it's been properly considered it is value for money before we tick it off anyway. So it doesn't worry me, it's just that again people might be frightened by the number of change events, the nature of them, without really understanding them. And also importantly I think it's good to have value for money reports but the other thing we're insisting on is having lessons learnt which feeds into value for money. The lessons-learnt workshops are proving to be really good value to reflect on how we've gone, where were the areas for improvement, and what should we continue to do in the future. I think they're tremendously valuable forums.

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.

• Project participant organisations hire on the basis of technical excellence as being baseline BAU expectations, and business and interpersonal collaboration skills as providing a defining edge.
• Project participant organisations understand the value proposition of their employees to encourage their support and enthusiasm to work within an alliance.
• Project participant organisations understand that they need to provide strong KSAE development initiatives and programmes to attract and retain rare talent.
• Project team participant organisations understand and effectively manage the transition of team members entering and leaving an alliance so that they remain energetic and motivated and that they are willing and keen to remain working within an alliance context.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding of recruitment, development and retention processes, and how to apply them in recruiting teams with a best-for-project mind set.
• Business solutions KSAE – Participant organisations’ HRM staff need high levels of understanding and the value of knowledge, skills, and experience gained by their employees while on an alliance to the base organisation.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE are needed to effectively engage and communicate with staff who become, in many ways, expatriate staff embedded in the alliance but will at some stage return to their base organisations.

The manner in which staff is recruited with a best-for-project mindset/culture can be illustrated at three levels. The first level is selecting and recruiting the entire NOPs team.

We're trying to put together a process for selection that is ruled up and rigorous and gives us the best chance of getting the best group of people together into an alliance. So we've got that ongoing tension. What's happened now is we've probably, in terms of the winning criteria, there's probably about 20/21% is based on behaviour, and that's behaviour we assess in two-day workshops. And a big lot of the people who work for us are GPs or charted psychologists and things like that, and they carry that [the team assessment for selection] out. So I suppose there's only about three of us with project-type backgrounds. Most come from psychology-type backgrounds, but very practical. They've worked on business for most of their careers. With a heavier emphasis on that, we use the personality profiling to help us select members—not as effectively as members of the project alliance board, because sometimes there isn't a choice when the supplier does need to have a certain person in there. But what we do with that personality profile, they all have the profile done, they have one-to-one feedbacks, and then we have a session where we look at the dynamics of the group. And that's taken through by one of the psychologists in terms of the differences in how people do things and how they will behave and how we have to manage that inside the project alliance board. And we do the same with inside the alliance leadership team. And then there's a series of workshops, because what we're doing in the [PO X] situation is we're treating it as a change management programme, because we're having to change from a traditional mindset to an alliancing mindset, with all the appropriate tools that go with that.

…in selecting the alliance we spent a lot of time in picking what we felt was the best team, the right team at the right place at the right time. We spent a lot of time looking at the people that they were putting up and the cultures of the organisations in knowing that we have to bring six different organisations together, six different cultures, and there was a lot of mainly gut feeling on how it would work and things like that. We went to the market and we had the majors in one group, we had the designers in one group, and we had the second-tier players in another group. We were really focussing on the culture of the people, their availability to hit the ground running as soon as we appointed them. The other thing which we focussed on was trying to give the second tier a bit of an opportunity of playing with the majors and we achieved that by having both [NOPs A and B] in it.

One of the benefits for [PO X] is that [PO X] has been able to retain some pretty good employees, particularly, I mean the market's softened right up now, but during a time when there was some pretty tight competition for resources, it gave [PO X] employees a really good opportunity to work in the semi-private sector type environment, but have the comfort of working for a government organisation—if that makes sense. So [PO X] has got some—well I mean the [PO X] employees within the alliance sort of rate pretty much equally with, you know, the [NOP A], [NOP B] employees and I don't think [PO X] would have been able to hold onto them over the last five years if there wasn't this opportunity, I would say.

The second level is at the POR level internally. The manner in which the PO selects its internal POR staff is summed up as follows:

So basically because the other thing to keep in mind is that 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 programme so we set up the [PO X] Alliance a bit over four years ago. Basically to deliver those smaller type projects that have built up in the order of 90–100 million dollars’ worth of a year within a project. So in the order of 15–25 projects a year that we had to deliver. So it was about coming up with a methodology to deliver the programme. Secondly, it was about trying to provide opportunities to retain our staff, but also to secure external resources rather than have to compete all the time.

I really wasn't sure what I was in for. I'd heard a little bit from [person X] about what they're like and that, but that was from a distance, so to speak. But yeah, dropping into them it was interesting and I think I made a comment to one or two alliances that it would have been good if there was some induction for new ALT members, that's something that I found we haven't been really good at. So it's a really sharp introduction into what is the alliance and this is where we're at so far. So a bit of an induction would have been good, in my opinion so I was up a steep learning curve. I was just sort of overwhelmed at the beginning, too, with the Section of information that was coming.

The third level is the way that second tier participants who are outside the alliance but working as suppliers and subcontractors using more traditional procurement forms are expecting or being encouraged to work within the collaboration framework of an alliance.

…the T5 Agreement worked because BAA was unusual because they were the client and owner and operator, but they were also working as the project manager for the whole project as what we call a systems integrator. They were pulling everything together and they were the first-tier suppliers who were involved in this T5 Agreement. The second-tier suppliers were a number of contractors who would support the first-tier suppliers were part of the T5 Agreement and supposed to use the same spirit of this agreement in the way that they managed their subcontractors.

That commitment has got to be acknowledged from the organisation, we never lost anybody that we wanted to keep unless they resigned from the organisations. We did a lot of inductions and things like that for supply chain, we induced about ten thousand people but there was always a focus in the inductions on our culture, our safety requirements, what's expected of those people. When they were onsite, they were seen to be a part of a team and they were expected to exhibit the behaviours as the rest of the team.

I think realistically the collaboration is really between [Org X] and [Org Y]. I don't necessarily see subcontractors that the alliance would engage see a need or some sort of different incentive to perform the job differently because of collaboration approach. I think they understand that [Org Y] has the [Org X] hat on or that in that area there is a slightly different hat on; it's like state government with a bit of a private edge and they require different outcomes and they're going to be hotter on the safety and those sort of things, but also focused on delivery, focused on getting things done quickly and to standard and making that happen. I don't see a lot of flowing out of the collaboration culture into other subbies necessarily, they're all pretty hungry out there and they want to make sure that they get a chance to work on the alliance because that's a pay cheque. They know that if they work, they get consistency, they get the same focused aim day in, day out, there are no loss or they don't need to guess at where they are in the process.

Project participants embracing a no-blame culture and avoiding blame shifting as a result of two sets of drivers. First, having felt pain and hardship through past experience of being blamed and therefore, being determined not to repeat the experience and to thus support a no-blame culture. Second, having experienced positive benefits as a result of working within a no-blame culture.

• Project participants being able to reflect upon past experiences of the harm triggered by a blame culture and identifying and understanding how those behaviours developed and were supported by the workplace or prevailing community culture.
• Project participants being able to reflect upon past experiences and understanding the advantage of working within a no-blame culture and identifying that and understanding how those behaviours developed and were supported.
• Project participants being able to develop alternative mechanisms to those that produce and nurture a blame-culture. This may include linking collaborative consensus decision-making to shared pain/gain based on project performance (as opposed to individual participant team performance) along with a no-litigation contract clauses and other support measures that enhance participants taking shared responsibility and accountability for all project outcomes rather than those only directly affecting them.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding of tools and processes and their advantages and limitations to be able to judge when to agree or disagree with others and how to negotiate, through adopting a constructive dialogue with others, and shape solutions that all can agree upon and take responsibility and accountability for.
• Business solutions KSAE – Participants need high levels of understanding of the relative transaction cost of lack of collaboration and disputation, as often is present within a BAU. They need to understand how a no-blame culture environment may save transaction costs.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE are needed to communicate with others and to influence others and be influenced by them to achieve a no-blame culture.

A core part of the no-blame culture is centred on the right (and propensity) for parties to sue each other in most contract forms, and how for some procurement forms this right is given up in exchange for elimination of the need for litigation. The following quotes on two separate projects in Australia illustrate this aspect. The first is where A09 discusses how an alliance was considered but the project ended up as a joint venture agreement that attempted a watered-down version of an alliance because of a reluctance to accept any form of no-litigation and no-blame culture. The second was illustrated with quotes from P17 and P25 about the rationale for subsequently forming an alliance between two organisations on a project.

One of the projects we were going to look at is the cross-city tunnel, and we went there for an interview and we were talking to the guys and then they just clamped up, you know, went away and decided not to do it as an alliance, they decided to do it as a…just a joint venture. I mean, the results speak for itself – it's a dismal result. Over budget, got sued by residents and businesses, and traffic didn't flow through the tunnel. The old industry, the old ways of doing things, are entrenched, and it's very hard to change that, and you find a group of people who work on innovative forms of contracting or organisation forms that once these finish they expect you to go back to old ways of doing things, and they don't cope, and slowly they give up, lose hope and just become indoctrinated into the old system. So these people that could have potentially transformed an industry have become like everyone else.

…it's always been my belief that in order to facilitate that you have to create at least predominantly a commercial framework where you remove the run points and create a commercial reason why it actually makes sense to collaborate and direct your energies toward understanding and working together, rather than directing your energies toward pointing the finger. And I have seen examples of people who in other contexts are quite dictatorial and quite hard-nosed, when put into a context where you've changed the rules and they've actually been quite effective, because what they realise is that now my interests are served by working with these people to solve a problem, because our fates are entwined. There's no point in blaming. So I think it's a combination of creating the right commercial and contractual context, coupled with having those kind of leadership qualities of people who inherently are more authentic, they have better skills at empathy and understanding, but are nonetheless still driven toward a commercial outcome.

…[Project X] was still underway and there was an enormous amount of conflict occurring on [Project X] between the M&E contractor in the tunnel and the civil contractor, which was basically us. And I'm talking serious conflict, so the parties were more or less at war from a contractual point and a commercial point of view, but even worse than that, the project was suffering a time lag because the parties were very misaligned.

…And so what was happening on [Project X] is the project director would just go “Look, I've got to get my civil works done,” so they would just go and do things in there that were detrimental to the M&E contractor. Then that would result in a claim from the sub-contractor that sort of went on. There was a guy who I was trying to negotiate the contract with. His name was [xxxx], who was telling me the [Org A] side of the story on [Project X]. And he said “Look, without you listening to just your guys in isolation, how about I take you down to [Project X] and show you what's happening from my point of view?” And I could see, because I had no bias in this, the [Org B] guys I talked to just hated [Org A]. They just thought they were incompetent. Then when I met with the [Org A] guys and they showed me some of the photos of what had happened, even historically, you could see, the whole thing, it was just a bunfight inside the tunnel. Everybody was trying to get access and they weren't necessarily deciding on what were the best priorities in terms of the best outcome from the project. They were all just looking after their own personal interests and definitely we were getting a substandard outcome.

P06 provides a useful insight about the D&C approach from a client's perspective. In this quote, it is clear that there is litigation going on but between the designer and constructor participants in a D&C contract. The client gains from the arrangement but the D&C parties do not. There is no evidence of collaboration between the client and D&C consortium and so potential gains are not considered. The no-blame culture is absent here in contrast to the alliance examples.

Well it was the way the whole system used to be run and it didn't help the client, because it was all cleared up at the end, they didn't know what their commitment was. You finished on site and a big claim turned up and no one knew it was coming your way and it was obviously a financial mess. But the market place has virtually turned away from traditional contracts, you get the odd one, but design and build has just become more and more, you know, the norm. And we've just finished the [Project x], which is a very, very sophisticated building…so there was lots and lots of issues of not having it constructed properly. We went design and build in the end, and the reason we went design and build because we felt the design team couldn't actually produce the information in sufficient time and quality, not to have a claim by the contractor. And that was proven to be the case, so what happened was the client had a budget of 22 ½ million, we delivered the project for 22 ½ million, it was late because of late receipt of design information, and the claim right is the contractor against the consultant, not the contractor against the client, because of the poor performance of the professional team, the architects, and the engineers. As far as the client is concerned, they're tickled pink because they didn't have any more money, and I was actually there this morning and said if you'd gone down that old route, you'd be sat here with a massive claim thinking where am I going to get this two or three million pounds from disruption and everything else and how am I going to pay it. And all we're talking about now is a few defect acoustic doors, okay which is an issue but nothing like it could have been.

Central to support mechanisms for the establishment and maintenance of a no-blame culture is a need for genuine collaboration to enable participants to gain a more accurate understanding of the perspective and problems faced by each party to the collaboration and an ability to use that knowledge to generate creative win-win problem solutions. Developing consensus decision making (discussed in theme 11) also helps develop a no-blame culture because with it becomes illogical to allocate blame to others for a decision that one is a party to. Having a binding no-litigation agreement helps to bolster trust because there is greater confidence in parties sharing an interest, and this is further reinforced by having agreed fair pain/gain sharing arrangements tied to a project rather than individual team performance.

• Project participants being able to affectively identify with other parties’ perspectives and to empathise with them to understand issues and challenges they are grappling with.
• Project participants being able to effectively collaborate to find and implement win-win problem solutions that meet best-for-project outcomes while meeting reasonable needs of each participant.
• Considering how to best share responsibility and accountability for decisions that all parties are affected by or can influence to enable fair and just decision action outcomes.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of understanding of tools and processes and how each party can collaborate to help develop synergistic decision making and action outcomes.
• Business solutions KSAE – Participants need high levels of understanding of how to frame mechanisms that engender a no-blame culture.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of interpersonal KSAE are needed to communicate with others and to influence others and be influenced by them to achieve a no-blame culture.

Central to developing mechanisms supporting a no-blame culture is intense collaboration and consensus decision making, through truly being able to appreciate multiple perspectives on issues and challenges to be overcome.

They say that yeah, there is somewhat of a cultural clash for us, because we 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 in communicate and sell it within the organisation.

Because the management team was quite balanced in terms of perspective, then it meant that we were able to have a robust discussion at the management team level. Then if we couldn't come to an agreement with the management team, then it would go to the leadership team, I would present it to the leadership team for approval, but honestly we didn't have to have the leadership team get involved in more than 10 of these things, and there have been hundreds over the course of the project, so much things have been able to be managed by the management team.

The other thing I would do differently, just by chance, the way the project office is laid out, it's mostly square, there's this though, where do you think the architects are?…up in that corner…Even just the little thing about the positioning of people makes a difference, yeah, so if I had it to do again I would have integrated it into the office.

When you're sitting in a meeting talking about ductwork above a seating array, you need to understand enough of it to understand the problem and understand what's needed, what needs to be tweaked in order to solve the problem, not from a technical perspective but who do you need to involve, who do you need to move or who needs to move in order to solve the problem and who's going to have to compromise and how are we going to get to that compromise and all of that.

…the client bears the risks. This is the kind of traditional approach to risk which is that the client dumps the risk down onto the contractor, the contractor dumps it down onto their subcontractors and so on. So all the way down you're getting risk dumped down. 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 an interesting way of controlling costs is to pay what it costs. All of this was written down in a novel kind of contract and they called it Handbook T5 Agreement. The handbook is a big fat thing and it gave details of how you're going to work in this kind of an environment right from the top in great detail, and each of the contractors was given this and asked to read it. If they agreed to that code of conduct, to working in that way, they would sign it and it became a contract and that's how they operated this thing. So basically what they were doing was social engineering in a way, trying to change the behaviour of years and years of behaviour in the construction industry, collaborative works, integrated project team working partly.

…when we say things like no-blame, that doesn't mean that you can't challenge. So we really—so part of our induction was saying, look, it's alright to challenge somebody, it's alright to say look, you've stuffed that up, as long as you do that in a respectful manner. So we did spend time, and we did this without facilitation. We started with facilitators, and then we thought, look, we could probably try this ourselves. But we really tried to just induct people into what was required, but at the same time, have the courage or the strength to actually challenge it when things weren't right. So as I say, I know that there's two or three that had to go because I had to challenge them and say, look, and after a couple of times say this isn't working. But most of the times when you challenge them and say, look, that type of behaviour is—standing up and saying bloody designers are hopeless and they're always late with designs, and they've got no concept of budget and—that behaviour is unacceptable. It's unacceptable because—not because I say so, but because it doesn't align with our behaviours, we're all one team, we've got—we all share an equal role. So reminding people that the designer is part of the overall project and the overall programme performance, not just in getting his IFT drawings out. His performance is also linked to the overall project. He's part of the team. It's an integrated team. So we really did spend quite a lot of time trying to induct and train people of that. We would do things like fortnightly communication workshops where we really tried to build that team spirit and break down that design and construct thing. I suppose the other was that it comes back to the culture of the team. So the things that we thought of made up a culture of systems, symbols and procedures. So things like badging.

Taking into account national and organisational cultural theory discussed in Chapter 4, we focus here on power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and collectivist/individualist cultural dimensions, though these can be seen to also be linked the other cultural dimensions such as masculine/feminine with regard to behaviours and attitudes to diversity and inclusivity and to some extent concepts of time (short-term or long-term). Cultural orientation drives behaviours and that, in turn, affects the extent to which decision making is consensus driven or command-and-control driven.

• Participants expect that those with relevant expertise to contribute opinion and discussion input do so regardless of their place within a hierarchy.
• Participants welcome assumptions being challenged and are careful to consider a range of perspectives when making decisions.
• Participants are respectful of others’ perspective but assertively argue their points of view to arrive at a balanced conclusion.
• Participants expect that a consensus will emerge from a meaningful debate and that consensus-driven decisions will be more effectively actioned when they are not afraid to raise the issue of reviewing a consensus-based decision if they believe that the basis, context and underlying assumptions for those decisions have changed.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence should be demonstrated and offered to contribute to all relevant decision-making discussions.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding longer-term business impacts of decisions being considered on the home base organisation and project.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of ability to communicate, comprehend the perspective of others, and to effectively negotiate.

National cultural traits are highlighted by interviews with people with experience in Nordic countries, where there is a high emphasis on consultation and consensus in decision making.

…there is somewhat of a cultural clash for us, because we 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 in communicate and sell it within the organisation.

…. another issue is that the German people have to go back to their bosses all the time and ask for permission about everything, while Swedish people can be more, kind of, they can make decisions and they can check, perhaps check afterwards, or they have kind of, they have some autonomy to make decisions on their own based on their expert areas. So it's easier, shorter decision routes in the Swedish culture. But what's interesting is that also the Germans, when they have been working in these projects, they think that it is a very good way of working, so they perceive it as a way of working which is much better than their traditional way, and they are able to adapt, it just takes a bit longer time for them. So it's not impossible.

Especially when talking to these people that were involved in the projects and others around, they—I mean their interpretation of what partnering is—I mean if I put it this way, the word “partnering” the Swedish translation of that have a meaning of its own, which is similar to partnering—the American expression. But I think the interpretation and it—for the people that aren't involved in partnering on a daily basis, they base their understanding on what partnering is through what the word partnering means. So I found that talking to a lot of people they didn't use or they didn't talk about the same thing as partnering. And looking at the procurement or the agreement in this case, no one involved in the project, I think this is just—read about the definition of what partnering is and what partnering should be. They just decided that we need some collaborative way of working and let's call is partnering, and then negotiated what it should be.

So culture is actually a major moderating force and it's the thing that most companies forget, and the Japanese forgot when they went abroad. You know, you can't do that.

…the problem is that gave them a serious problem, in terms of—they—you know, they say that basically all their business is based on trust. It is the case in Japan, but it's not the case when they end up working in the Arab states, where they get ripped off and don't get paid. So it's a totally different ballgame out there. This is what they're struggling to, I think, come to terms with, but they have to learn to work in those environments and they have to get themselves project management systems.

Well, I mean you're stuck within an institutionalised system and I think the issue with that is it's—everything changes, not by individuals but by policy. Policy is what drives the—if you like, the company or the organisation or whatever. It's not individuals. That's quite difficult for westerners to get their head around.

Structural and organisational elements are important beside culture as an enabler or inhibitor. The way that governance is designed has great impact, the roles that people play in various committee or decision-making board levels, and protocols used that govern how meetings will be conducted, all affect how consensus decisions can be enabled or inhibited.

• Participants ensure that organisations are structured to facilitate communication between hierarchical and discipline levels within the project.
• Participants are mindful about national and organisational/discipline cultural norms and expectations to ensure that they design mechanisms to open up dialogue and challenging assumptions to ensure that each party to a decision is allowed to work through any difficulties in understanding broader perspectives.
• Participants understand the value of face-to-face as well as electronic meetings to allow trust and commitment to “grow” and be sustained to result in ease of consensus-based decision making.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence should be demonstrated and offered to design governance mechanisms that facilitate consensus of decision making.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding the value of trust and social capital to be gained and grown from consensus in decision making.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of ability to communicate, comprehend the perspective of others, and to effectively reach consensus in decision making.

Two aspects are illustrated here for enabling consensus decision making. P20 explains how the structure of the AMT and ALT can facilitate consensus decision making. P28 talks about how consensus works for setting KPIs, which are important for agreed performance.

Construction manager, design manager and basically client interface manager, the user interface manager, so if you want to go to corporate hats you have someone from the architect, someone from the builder and one of the clients in the AMT throughout the project. So that's been consistent, some of the people have changed, but [X] used to be in the AMT previously. But the roles of the people in the AMT has been consistent and it's been a small AMT all the way through. Then we have a mixed group of people that we call key managers who are that next layer of people with key responsibilities within their lives.

…we had done a design for the air conditioning which absolutely didn't work because there was, one entity had gone off and done it themselves and it came back on the table and it just, it wouldn't work, we couldn't actually fit it in the ceiling, kind of a problem. So, we went back and we, for it to be about getting this design right because it had to fit in the ceiling, it had to have enough capacity to blow enough air on the people to make them comfortable, and it had to be quiet enough so that the acoustics were, the acousticians were happy so it had to please the architects, the engineers and the acousticians in this, and we were desperate time-wise to get this result, it went for weeks trying to get resolved. How it finally got resolved is that we had a number of sort of group sessions and we'd get to what we thought was a solution and we'd get just shy of the solution and then we'd find a major problem, and in the end, the acoustician, who was not a party to the alliance, but who happens to be a mechanical engineer by trade, before he was an acoustician, said I'm going to take the plans home over the weekend and I'm going to solve this and I'll come back on Monday with a proposal that meets the mechanical engineering criteria and the acoustical criteria. He was sure he could do this if, you know, it was a classic examples of too many cooks in the stew, so he said, let me go away on the weekend, let me think about this, I'll come back on Monday, we'll meet first thing on Monday and I'll propose a solution, and he did and it worked, and it's in and it works and we did our commissioning and it works beautifully.

We did spend a lot of time early in developing the AMT/ALT relationship and we had a lot of dual meetings for a while, especially trying to set the ground rules and early in the project we'd focus on the culture and that.

For four weeks or something like that and times of adversity like that pulled people together, we reset all our targets, we took it on the management team to refocus people and set where we're going. Call it the second half that we were into or the third quarter of the football analogies and things but it just built stronger and stronger.

I think there's enough of a driver within, you know, the three organisations working in the alliance to want to do well with what [PO X], the client, sees as key results areas without having to incentivise them. And supervising then places a whole sort of requirement on [PO X] to be able to prove that they're actually getting real value for money in paying for those KPIs, so it really influences the way the KPIs are developed. So I think if you are able to free up the KRA, KPI framework from incentivisation, rather have that sort of amount in an agreed sort of fixed margin, it would reduce a lot of unnecessary effort in trying to sort of come up with KPIs that can be justified to pay money against.

And on the strength of “formerly mere subcontractors” having a real voice in decision making P24 highlighted that:

Another example there was the alliance manager was a programme maker, rather than a D&C contractor being a programme taker. That's a big difference. So we had a proper voice at the table on overall project planning decisions. That was quite an important aspect.

An enabler of consensus is having both the people that can make authoritative decisions empowered to do so, as well as the procurement choice structure that enables that. P38 says:

…especially from a client perspective because [Project A] was a classic for that. We closed down the railway line, [Line P and Line Q] for four weeks and during that time [PO X] was having trouble with their Siemens trains braking, so they had all these trains on the [Line P and Line Q] side of our site and they were all being nicely serviced and everything and the ones on the city side couldn't get serviced and they were being taken out of service because of their braking problem. I think it was about day 13 they said they need to get six of the trains from the outer network, if you like, to the inner network and within three days we'd totally changed our program, our sequence of works and dragged the trains through on skeleton track by diesel train and by day 17 and they got them through and that helped their broader business. There's no need for correspondence, it's all just a meeting, talked about the practicalities of it, whereas with D&C you'd be looking at all the claims and setting yourself up to put some sort of delay claim in and all that, so it cuts all that out…

While inhibitors are mainly the reverse of enablers, a notable inhibitor to consensus is a feeling of participants being coerced or railroaded into a decision without sufficient time, information, or credibility of voice to be heard and considered. Lack of motivation to commit the energy and intellectual effort to arrive at consensus can be an inhibitor, as noted in the discussion of decision making and chaos and complexity in Chapter 3 (Figure 11), as opposed to complicated situations. There are times when there is a need of rapid action and reflection in which consensus decision making is not viable.

• Participants ensure that organisations avoid being poorly resourced and structured to facilitate communication between hierarchical and discipline levels within the project.
• Participants avoid being poorly mindful about national and organisational/discipline cultural norms and expectations to ensure that they design mechanism to open up dialogue and challenging assumptions to ensure that each party to a decision is allowed to work through any difficulties in understanding broader perspectives.
• Participants avoid misunderstanding or ignoring the value of face-to-face as well as electronic meeting to allow trust and commitment to be “grown” and sustained that may result in ease of consensus in decision making.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence should be demonstrated and offered to design governance mechanisms that facilitate consensus of decision making.
• Business solutions KSAE– High levels of understanding the value of trust and social capital to be gained from consensus in decision making.
• Relational KSAE– High levels of ability to communicate, comprehend the perspective of others, and to effectively reach consensus in decision making.

A10 had some interesting things to say about research on non-alliance, but framework and partnering type delivered projects where consensus decision making was not required. Several comments were made worth highlighting, the first being about trends away from RBP. He also makes an interesting point about the role of trust in commitment and non-coercive consensus agreement. These were on non-alliance but notionally RBP projects.

The other aspect, which relates to the interviews I've been doing with four major contractors and the starting point for this was not procurement. It was actually marketing and business development, and the primary question is: to what extent has the post-2008 credit crunch changed marketing business development practices? And there are a couple aspects behind that. The first is that we've seen the demise of formal partnering arrangements with the post-Egan and post-Egan agendas in the U.K. We're seeing more or less the demise to that and anecdotally, the rise of cost drivers, rather than trying to lever the better value…. cost drivers would seem to suggest perhaps the demise of relationship marketing growing—it's never really been established, but growing in construction and perhaps reining back to more the price-driven transactional marketing mix approach.

One was that, in order to achieve the better value for money and that particularly through cost reduction, was through collaboration. That 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.” So they were still pursuing that road and they believe that it was better for achieving the cost outcomes and therefore efficiencies for the company itself. So there's a lot of collaborative practices still being conducted on a more informal basis; by major contractors and largely on major projects.

…all the companies I interviewed were looking at trust in terms of self-interested trust. None had really gone to socially-orientated trust at all.

A paper I gave at [Conference name about an organisation using Framework Agreements]…was about trust or the lack of it between the project sponsors and the project managers, and there were quite low levels of trust between those two roles, the people occupying those roles in that organisation. And they have a project management framework that's supposed to, again, facilitate collaborative working with their contractors. Well, if you haven't got high levels of trust internally, it's going to be very difficult to inject good levels of trust to facilitate collaborative working with your contractors, so they may be a strong client in some ways but they're weak in that way for sure.

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.

…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.

A lack of ability of participants to make authoritative decisions when required can inhibit consensus-based decision making. Those unable to do this may not be incapable of doing so but simply may not have sufficient authority to commit to a decision. An example of this was given in a PA context relating to the seniority levels of ALT members.

…I think all the projects that had a rail component, but two of them were road authority and the other two for the Department of Transport, but I think what's happening now probably all of them had the rail operator involved, but I think [PO X] probably has got so many projects on the go now, you're not getting any special treatment, as I was saying we had a [Project A] and even [Project B] and so you're getting this middle manager, then you've got to stand in line with all the other projects that [PO X] is involved in…. and then what you're finding that they're just going back to their business and their business is giving a business-as-usual response or requirement back and so they don't have a lot of pull.

I'm just thinking even, so [Project C] we had chief operating officer and his made the project's goal from the rail operator. Then on [Project D], that had gone down a notch, a general manager and his first guy and by the time we got to [Project E], you're literally having middle management on the ALT.

Participants should be aware of the mechanisms that projects offer for many opportunities for learning about the PO's preferences and needs, how other team members operate, and how to best collaborate with them and to learn from the project 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 overcome lessons learnt becoming lessons forgotten or ignored.

• Participants understand the purpose and aim of the project so that they can adapt to new ideas and better direct their focus on effective rather than purely efficiency continuous improvement.
• Participants understand and are able to effectively frame lessons learnt within the context of the project and the socio-political environment in which the project is delivered.
• Participants understand the value proposition of those who may benefit to be familiar with lessons learnt about the projects performance and challenges faced to enable continuous improvement to take place.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence in being able to know the underlying context and assumptions about existing technology and what is new so that lessons learnt can be framed and documented in a way that makes transfer of these more effective.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding longer-term business impacts of gains and improvements made from lessons learnt and how best bring these back into the base organisation from the project setting.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathic ability to align learning styles with the context and content of lessons learnt.

In terms of aiming for standard approaches so that people are familiar with what has been best practices, A02 observed of a government agency that there was an appetite for standardisation through best practice models being promoted. This quote illustrates the value of all project participant teams having a clear idea of how each other works and how they make decisions and act on decisions made. It illustrates the challenge of coming up with a lessons-learnt process that is meaningful to all parties involved in a project and that can enable people to see the need to adapt to new ideas and reframing ideas where existing technology is changing.

…you perhaps have to create some common culture and way of acting early on which kind of has to be continuously nurtured in some way. So and they also have this idea of handbooks and processes, they say in Transport Administration…we should have the same way of working, in all our projects, they haven't had that but they think it would be good to have the same way of working and the consultants, contractors say that it would be good if the Transport Administration worked in the same way in all projects. Because as it is now it's probably more similarity between how the different contractors work and how the consultants work than it is between the different parts of the Transport Administration.

In terms of processes for capturing lessons learnt, the effectiveness of this process varies across projects that our respondents were familiar with. It was generally far from satisfactory, even in project alliances where there should be documented evidence of innovation and continuous improvement, as P24 and P30 observed:

There were certainly things tried and investigated, but they weren't logged. They probably just stayed in the heads of the people who were involved.

The national guidelines require value-for-money statements to be prepared in advance of going to the market place to form an alliance. So the client needs to be very clear about what is the value for money and then we deduce a whole big document on value for money before we proceeded to select partners or potential partners for the [X] and [Y] rail grade separations. And there's also a requirement that when you reach practical completion of your alliances that the client needs to prepare a value-for-money report to demonstrate what has been achieved. With doing that, I've been reflecting on my experience that these sort of reports tend to pop out at the end of the alliance work when teams are being disbanded and the knowledge capture is extremely difficult because all those with the wisdom about the value that we've delivered have departed. So trying to bring it all together and collated to form a great value-for-money report becomes very problematic. And I've been saying to the recent alliances that I'm in and they get it, and six months out before the end I really made an issue of it and I get lots of people promising me that we're in the throes of developing and we've got a framework and we've drafted something up, and I keep saying “I want to see it,” and guess what happens? It doesn't come. It's a low priority from the team's perspective and again becomes a very difficult task at the end to pull it together. Having said that, though, the quality of the value-for-money reports is improving. Some years ago there wasn't a requirement, I don't think, to prepare value-for-money statements, although treasuries now ask from us a report on value for money for each of the alliances we've undertaken.

[PO X] has quite a commitment to, I guess, end-of-project reporting which is collecting information about key benefits, key risks, key achievements, risk and innovation and breakthroughs and a few other categories like that, and that we surveyed for key people who were responsible for all of these areas, whether it be design innovations. We had a design register of 30 or 40 innovations or something, these are major breakthroughs that we made at different stages to substitute a different material that gave a better performance in these conditions, or it might be a constructability improvement by lowering a gantry by this method you could produce the amount of disruption of traffic flow, that sort of thing.

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.

• Participants understand the mechanisms of reducing the “stickiness” of knowledge to facilitate transforming knowledge awareness into action.
• Participants understand the importance of context when applying lessons learnt from one situation to another and can effectively learn, unlearn, and relearn to accommodate adaptation to changed contexts.
• Participants understand the value proposition of those who may benefit from applying lessons learnt and reward those who are responsible for contributing this knowledge accordingly—this would usually entail non-financial forms of acknowledgement and reward that encourages the process of effectively documenting lessons learnt.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence in effectively being able to adopt/adapt and apply knowledge.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding longer term business impacts of effectively benefiting from knowledge.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathy ability to gain insights and knowledge from others and to be able to reframe personal knowledge.

Adapting existing knowledge perhaps in a quite different context is discussed by A02. Also, A09 had some observations about unlearning and relearning and the challenges of some people in the industry accepting the value of improvisation through adapting knowledge. A10 draws out the strength of non-cognates (people in leadership or senior manager roles who are not from the dominant disciplines engaged in a project) in seeing lessons learnt and collaboratively shared knowledge differently.

But this city tunnel project, they say that now it was important for us to develop our own guidelines. Because if you are involved in developing something you learn it, yes and then it implements itself, instead of taking something that somebody else has developed and train people in it. They prefer to do it the other way round.

And it comes down to the issues of improvisation, you know…. whenever you talk about improvisation, if you go into a company and talk about improvisation—which I do a lot—they think you're crazy, because what they think is what you're talking about is letting go of everything you know…. And that's not what improvisation is. It's like a jazz musician, you know, a jazz musician who's learnt how to play his or her instrument since they were the age of three, so they know the limits they can take this instrument. A jazz guitarist know exactly the sound that guitar will make, what every fret will make, what every note will do by bending the head of the guitar, you know, what clicking his fingers on it will do, so he knows that instrument inside out, but they're still able to improvise with other musicians and create new music that is not…that can't replicated.

I mean this is a real challenge for us, and this is where I think the solution lies in design thinking, because 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.

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…

Continually challenging assumptions and context of past lesson learnt, P33 states in reference to a programme alliance setting where continuous improvement is a critical KRA.

I guess innovation is always about challenging, and whenever you innovate, you need to challenge the current paradigms, so we've set about creating and being part of a maintenance alliance that has the opportunity to run for 10 years and you'd like think in three to five, 10, over the last three years and certainly over the next 10 that you'd be able to look back and say we are a lot more efficient in delivery than we were to start.

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 so that cause-and-effect links can be understood to enable intelligent adaptation of lessons learnt to occur.

• Participants understand the variety of learning models that suit various people.
• Participants understand the importance of context when applying lessons learnt from one situation to another, and can effectively establish mechanisms to suit the people-learning context.
• Participants carefully ensure that the workplace is a “safe” place to learn from a physical sense (experimentation, simulation, for example) and from a psychological perspective (able to make mistakes without retribution, provided that there is learning from the mistake etc.).
• Participants understand the value proposition of those who may benefit from learning new skills and discovering new approaches.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence in effectively being able to design learning events that generate new knowledge.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding longer-term business impacts of effectively benefiting from knowledge.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathy ability to design and deliver learning and skills enhancement events to reflect the learner's needs and learning approach preferences.

P36 talked about how they actually used a lessons-learnt software tool and how it has affected the team's working approach. It illustrates what they did but does not strongly link back into a rationale for the approach. P31 also had a similar story about creating a learning environment for hands-on work learning:

But from a lessons point of view, our focus this year is really, at the back end of the alliance, is to gather our lessons and incorporate them into our new projects, but incorporate them into the systems that are transferring to all the three alliance partners really, but primarily to [PO X]. So we've actually got that fairly bedded in now in that we run a, we've got an overall lessons register and there's been a fair bit of work put into development. We've got, particularly, a guy in our alliance that is very good at developing these systems, so we've got an overall register now that we're using, where we put project lessons. And then we've also got what's, a thing called CMO which allows us then to track them. So we've got a good process now where, and we do a, each project we do a workshop at the end of each project and we bring a member of each of the different teams, stakeholder approvals, design, construction, project management, and the planning team from [PO X] now comes along, and we bring them all together for what's typically a two-hour meeting, and we go through the project from the referral phase through to the commissioning phase and say well, what were the lessons? Positive, negative, what were the lessons? And we capture then and then we say, we look at them and say well, can we change any of our systems, our specifications, our standard drawings? We've got design guides which really relate to the operation requirements on various different disciplines so we're then really feeding these back in. We've got an extensive flowchart system which is really one of the innovations I see in what we've done, and with 25 years of consulting experience I can tell you that, I quite often always talk about well, let's learn our lessons in consulting and then build them into the next project. But it's quite hard because you've got to have management and motivation and it takes time and effort to bring that all in together, and just an alliance atmosphere is a unique opportunity because you've got all the team members there and get everyone committed to it, and we're really starting to see that happening. So it's one of the big advantages, I think, and the positives that's come out of the alliance. And that's coming from a designer's perspective, so you've got to keep in mind that I'm a designer, so I always focus on those design improvement areas.

They saw that as an opportunity to bring someone like [Alliance Participant A] down into the region, impart [Alliance Participant A]'s key…capabilities on contractors in the region so that when the alliance leaves, [PO as participant] is left with a set of contractors that are really good at not only putting pipes in the ground, but their safety systems are first class, their quality systems, their environmental systems – all that sort of stuff that goes around that comes from a tier-one contractor. So a lot of the focus for us is getting the contractors on board on a lump sum, but then also working with them to build their capabilities. So all our sort of systems are designed to be shared. So, you know, all our project management, environmental safety, our quality systems are available on a portal that any contractor that works with us can download, put their branding on, and use sort of thing. So quite a few of the contractors use the alliance as an opportunity to build their business to the next level and, you know, obtain certification, you know, expand the type and range of clients that they can go for – all that sort of stuff.

P18 is a practitioner who is involved in alliance team and individual selection and also in coaching and training. His comments about team and individual selection illustrate which attributes of alliance participants are most highly valued.

…we're trying to put together a process for selection that is ruled up and rigorous and gives us the best chance of getting the best group of people together into an alliance. So we've got that ongoing tension. What's happened now is we've probably, in terms of the winning criteria, there's probably about 20/21% is based on behaviour, and that's behaviour we assess in two-day workshops. And a big lot of the people who work for us are GPs or charted psychologists and things like that, and they carry that out. So I suppose there's only about three of us with project-type backgrounds. Most come from psychology-type backgrounds but very practical. They've worked on business for most of their careers. With a heavier emphasis on that, we use the personality profiling to help us select members—not as effectively as members of the project alliance board, because sometimes there isn't a choice when the supplier does need to have a certain person in there. But what we do with that personality profile, they all have the profile done, they have one-to-one feedbacks, and then we have a session where we look at the dynamics of the group. And that's taken through by one of the psychologists in terms of the differences in how people do things and how they will behave and how we have to manage that inside the project alliance board. And we do the same with inside the alliance leadership team. And then there's a series of workshops, because what we're doing in the [PO X] situation is we're treating it as a change management programme, because we're having to change from a traditional mindset to an alliancing mindset, with all the appropriate tools that go with that.

This refers to the pain-sharing and gain-sharing arrangements, how the process was instigated, and how it operated. Shared accountability and a desire for innovation require a risk-and-reward mechanism to create an incentive to excel.

• Participants understand the nuances of the incentive pain/gain sharing philosophy, the value of trust and commitment that a risk/reward arrangement entails, and how best to effectively leverage the agreement to achieve best for projects outcomes.
• Participants understand consequences associated with the manner in which negotiations take place and how that affects participant positions, for example, single versus dual TOC processes and how that impacts upon identifying innovation during any negotiation phase.
• Participants understand how to balance pain and gain incentives to maximise the positive effects of potential innovation.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence in effectively understanding the technical requirements of what is being negotiated in terms of risks, uncertainties, and potential innovation and process improvements.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding longer-term business impacts of building capacity to negotiate at this level.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathy ability to successfully and effectively build confidence, trust, and commitment through negotiation.

The U.K. Design for Life Framework Agreements appear to be fairly straight forward in the risk/reward framework, as P05 and P06 outlines:

…essentially the contractors are target cost, so the SCP [Supply Chain Partner] signs up to a sum of money to deliver the job including all the design work and that's what you have to do. If he delivers that job for less than the target cost, he gets a portion of the difference. However in the design for life, if you go over, it's 100% pain, so it's up to them now to keep within that cost.

(Interviewer's question) Okay so that's where the profit and gain- and pain-sharing arrangements are agreed and then they just sort of work of that sort of fee arrangement?

(P05 response) All of that's agreed, at a framework level, so there's nothing for the client to negotiate, really, with the SCP, all they've got to do really is appoint them and let them get on with it…. the contractors’ target cost, so the SCP signs up to a sum of money to deliver the job, including all the design work, and that's what you have to do. If he delivers that job for less than the target cost, he gets a portion of the difference. However, in the design for life, if you go over, it's 100% pain, so it's up to them now to keep within that cost.

But the other issue is that economic circumstances should also reflect what choice you make in your contract selection. Because in today's marketplace, people are cutting their throats to get work, it's that competitive. If you've got a framework that you know is four years old and was agreed in the boom times and you've done nothing about it, and you carry on with it, you're paying well, well over the odds.

P17 illustrates how flexible these arrangements for pain/gain sharing are, as well as scope of works within the agreement, in relation to an innovative project alliance that was structured within a D&C contract in turn within a PPP.

…what we did is we actually opened it up so that the scope of the target cost included the civil works to be carried out by [NOP A and B]. That was one of the little breakthroughs we had in the commercial setup. And what that did, we talked about this in advance, we wanted to create an environment where there wasn't such a kind of a silo mentality about the scope of work, you know, and that it was just the mechanical and electrical scope and work.

…And the terms of compensation are all full open book sharing, 50/50 with some time KPIs and a few other use of the target outturn cost.

We also cite two examples now from a programme alliance. The first is where P31 explained the TOC formation and pain/gain sharing arrangements and how it worked in practice across many projects in a programme. This is important because on programme alliances overall, value for money is vital. This illustrates managing the tension of VfM with a reasonable gain-share incentive. The second is on a road alliance for capital expenditure and maintenance, where P32 explains the operation in practice after several years of experience of the programme alliance.

So the way the commercial model works, so if I just take [Participant A] as an example. They get a fixed margin on works done. So X% sort of paid on all works done. But then there's the top-up from KRA performance and top-up from under run on projects or the profit on individual projects. So the target additional top-up is very well understood by everyone in the alliance, and I guess we target on individual projects for at least a Y% under run, which is what [Contractor A] needed to top their margin up. And we very much understand if we go over an 8% under run, [Program owner] really starts questioning value-for-money. So we all understand our sweet spot by sort of between X-8% under runs on projects and that's, you know, the zone where everyone is happy sort of thing. So the good thing with a programme is there's a lot of swings and roundabouts on individual projects. So you have projects that have big over runs and big under runs, but overall the programme—we try and manage it so it's achieving that sort of Y-8% under run.

We started off we had a set of KPIs and there's some performance gain share/pain share in this. The KPIs we've had from the outset were probably a bit too clunky, a bit too detailed, a bit too labour intensive, so we're currently looking at reviewing those to simplify those and better target the KPIs. Interestingly, we set the KPIs in terms of what behaviours we wanted to drive, we've found those behaviours were there at the outset anyway and indeed they haven't really achieved anything significant in their own right. And from the contractor's point of view, the first couple of years they've had a performance gain share and they've actually decided as a show of good faith to reinvest that in the road. So they've actually spent their profit on doing more road works because they see that as reducing the maintenance costs in the long term, best for their network. Which is a really good indication of their commitment. But it puts into focus what are these KPIs.

Participants and project owners need to manage the tension between continuous improvement that keeps raising the BAU benchmark and how that is incentivised. It is important to balance providing sufficient incentive and reward for improvement while avoiding incentive targets being neither too easy nor too hard to undermine continuous improvement. This also brings in issues about the single versus dual TOC approach, and how much innovation capacity is held back in a dual/competitive TOC approach, and how the competitive dialogue approach works in practice, or indeed how it could be improved.

• Participants understand the nuances of the impact of stretch target's measures on motivation to improve the effectiveness of incentives for innovation and continuous improvement.
• Participants understand how to effectively negotiate improvement targets and KPIs that minimise harmful unintended consequences flowing from innovation and risk acceptance.
• Participants understand how to be flexible in reviewing and amending how KRAs are operationalized into KPI stretch targets to fit performance, and any administrative burden in their implementation that may reduce enthusiasm to innovate and improve.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence in effectively being able design learning KPIs and stretch targets.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding of the longer-term business impacts of effectively benefiting from continuous improvement and how to embed that within the organisation while minimising lost sunk costs in legacy systems and facilities.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathy, ability to recognise and obviate unintended negative consequences of stretch targets and to ensure that there are open channels for project management teams to negotiate and fine tune KPIs.

In response to a question about how the TOC was developed and any games being played to deliberately produce a “soft TOC” (i.e., one that has lots of hidden contingency “fat” in it), P20 stated that:

The commercial framework is a little bit different than sort of typical alliances and there's not a lot of upside for coming in way under budget or that sort of thing, so it kept people focused at the time of TOC, I think, on genuine best-for-project behaviours. TOC is the time when you can tend to see people retreating to sort of stereotypical behaviours and really, for the most part, people were very good. I was surprised actually. But you know, from time to time you will see a little bit of that, but for the most part, people have been surprisingly good, actually, for me. I haven't been involved in an alliance before, so maybe that's just expected and maybe we're less than others, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I guess compared to what I expected at the beginning, I would say that people have been able to behave pretty well in a best-for-project manner.

And in response to the PA example we had where there was only a 50/50 profit-at-risk model used rather than 100% profit-at-risk, P25 states:

…we ended up having this element of the margin that was protected. There was always this danger that they'd go “Oh well, if worst comes to worst, at least we'll make the $20 million that's guaranteed. We might not make the 40, but we'll make the 20.” Then they'd lose interest, so that was the problem. And that's the danger with any alliance, of course, is that when the margin's completely gone then it just becomes cost, so you've got to avoid that, but ideally if you're aligned, then it won't happen. So that was probably the main improvement.

The process of operationalizing the KRAs into meaningful KPIs that can be useful in a pain- and gain-sharing arrangement requires a fine balance of avoiding be over-specific and yet being demonstratively accountable, especially with respect to gains from perceived soft KPIs. P45 had some useful observations, including this one.

If I use the KRAs as an example, so they define the KRAs which then get converted, then we get a bunch of KPIs associated with that, and the KPIs that are generally thought up are I think good KPIs, they're relevant KPIs, and then what happens is that they realise these KPIs are difficult to measure and when I say difficult to measure, I mean two things. One, from an administration point of view, they're time-consuming but they're really hard to defend in front of Treasury when you're giving out money based on the performance of a KPI, so then they start to alter the KPI, either the—so that they can get something that they've got robust measurement against, and then all of a sudden what you're capturing or measuring is not really meeting the intent of your KRA, so one of the KRAs that we had for one of the alliance was value for money, like value for money was a KRA.

Action learning is about team leaders and members seeing the project as a learning laboratory, and there needs to be acceptance that both experimental success and failure requires discussion and analysis. Often unexpected opportunities arise out of failed experiments where they are being reframed and have led to encouraging benefits in other contexts.

• Participants understand the role that reflection, dialogue and debate has in learning-by-doing and the value of action learning as a critical part of continuous improvement and innovation.
• Participants understand the importance of action learning within projects and being able to face paradoxes and challenges as experiences to learn from through learning with others.
• Participants understand the value of the two conversations of action learning. The first being the internal conversation with one-self that models, reasons, predicts and anticipates results from action. The second is the external conversation of clarification with others, where concepts, plans and actions are explained in a peer-review environment so that clarity of explanation and rationale is extracted from this process.
• Participants understand who may benefit from action learning and how to engage them.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence in effectively being able to design and participate in action learning, including the use of simulation, modelling and experimentation.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of understanding the longer-term business advantage of gaining absorptive capacity from action learning, experimentation, and modelling.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathy ability to be able to effectively participate in action learning and be able to communicate lessons learnt.

In Europe there is extensive use of what is called the Competitive Dialogue (CD), in which participants negotiating to undertake a project is engaged in a series of in-depth interviews and exploration of the project's scope, scale, and complexity with the project owner. This CD, in effect, produces a series of simulations through what-if questions and through the dialogue investigating and modelling innovative practices that may be deployed. This illustrates one form of action learning. A01 explained this process and provided a useful illustration:

…also it was more also about how do you organise your maintenance programme, what type of asphalt would you use, what—that was a very important issue for the ministry for how many maintenance days, what's the planning of your maintenance in relation to the type of asphalt that you use on the road; is it under—do you put some asphalt on the road and do you have only 1–10 years sort of big maintenance project or each year a few days maintenance. That trade-offs—that was very important because it was one of the major and ambitious tunnels in Netherlands so the number of days that it would be closed or how did you organise the maintenance of this tunnel during the next 30 years was a very important issue during this procurement issue and discussion.

Other forms of action learning are to reflect on practices and try to document them and to systematically develop process and procedures from knowledge gained that is the fine-tuned, enhanced and updated within and based upon practice. As A02 states:

But this city tunnel project, they say that now it was important for us to develop our own guidelines. Because if you are involved in developing something you learn it, yes and then it implements itself, instead of taking something that somebody else has developed and train people in it. They prefer to do it the other way round.

A13 in his discussion about his team's longitudinal research into the Heathrow T5 programme of work made the following comments about experimentation and prototyping as a form of action learning:

The fifth element of this, off-site pre-assembly tests. Because of this problem about one entrance and the restrictions getting onto the site and no laydown space, they had to come up with alternative arrangements, and what they did, they created off-site two consolidation areas. One at Colnbrook where they had a railway line going in bringing steel, concrete, and a lot of prefabrication of all the steel and concrete cages and prefabricated concrete panels, which were then brought onto site already partly manufactured. The other part of that was testing because you didn't want to have unexpected things happen on the construction site, you'd test the method of construction off-site before you brought anything on-site. So again it's about learning.

Make your mistakes off-site so when you come on-site you can do things right. And the last element in this system was the adjusted time logistics and again this is really to deal with this problem of having no laydown areas and having just one entrance to the thing. What they did was they took some software that had been used in the car industry and adapted it. I can't remember what they called it but basically what happened every day there is a plan of how much work you're going to do, and the materials are called on-site for that amount of work that you're going to do.

A16 observing an engineering projects in remote parts of Sweden in terms of flexibility and experimentation to try out different approaches makes some salient points, and it also reinforces the need for a no-blame culture to be flexible and solve problems:

They tried some new - they had, from North America, this huge—it looks like a huge chainsaw that you put on a big machine that goes through and kind of cuts like a chainsaw in the dirt. Similar to the ones that you use when you do tunnels, but it's not going around, you have a chainsaw…. it worked really well in summer time, but as fast—as soon as it got a bit cold it didn't work. So they tried a few different alternatives, and they had that one and they had another big machine that they shipped over and tried…

…actually, having the flexibility to work around obstacles. So there was quite a lot of ad hoc discussion with landowners also. If you had a path that was decided and all of a sudden they realised that there were rocks…They just had discussions along the way and say, “Would it be okay for you if we go around this one? If we go to the edge there. It takes us…we go around during the day, it takes a week to go across” and have an informal agreement and then putting in all the documents when they already did it. And taking the risk of with the appeals and everything, but if it went through they are already past that.

Finally, to leave this subtheme with a practitioner quote, the impact of increasing a group's absorptive capacity to embed action-learning outcomes into their business model is illustrated by P36 with two relevant aspects as follows. The first is about the way that insights from action learning can be captured and used as an organisational learning tool, and the other aspect is the impact that this kind of learning can have on organisations.

…rather than fill that in the form and saying, “I went out and inspected it,” and how we track our SQE, our safety, quality, and environment inspections, and what's happening out on site, they're all done through iPads now. So they go out on site and use an iPad and these link either remotely to, back into our office or when they come back into WiFi zone that all their reports, and all that automatically get loaded up, and CMO is a software package that's been developed, that's been, the last 12 months we've been developing it…. And so with our lessons, what we're doing is we have all these lessons, of course, then you get actions out of it. So we do all this workshop, we're doing all these discussions and then there's actions. People, we're saying well, we need to get these actions incorporated into our systems, our tools, everything that we use. So the team has to do that.

I was out on site last week and talking to a contractor that, I probably worked with 20 years ago that's been a long-term pipeline contract during, in the western part of Victoria and they've actually gone, they've done a number of projects with the Alliance now, so they've gone through this learning curve and enhanced their systems and their tools, and the comment that was given to me is that they're now there, they're actually using these systems and tools to win work that they weren't winning before with larger and higher tier companies and contractors, and that the feedback they're getting is wow, this is really good stuff. This is better than what some of the other contractors have got. So it's part of business development. That contractor is actually from the growth through doing the alliance work, has really moved their business into another level.

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 contextualised 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. Coaching occurs when individuals are assigned an experienced coach who can help them perceive their thought processes and actions more clearly, and steps them through scenarios and simulations of how particular issues, challenges, and problems can be addressed. Mentoring is more general and can help individuals to see decision-action in a more holistic light and how their career and personal/professional development can be enhanced through access to wise advice.

• Participants understand the role and advantages that coaching and mentoring can have to help them confront and overcome immediate challenges and difficulties, with the coach drawing answers out of them through a reflective dialogue and mentors providing some sound advice to do their job and how they can effectively identify and use the services available.
• Participants understand the political environment they confront and have the ability to source political advice and to enhance their political skills to handle situations where the solution is political and not technical or administrative.
• Participants understand how they can coach and mentor their colleagues or to identify suitable coach and mentor resources for them.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence in effectively being able to design and participate in a coaching and mentoring initiative to develop project/programme staff to help them achieve and perhaps exceed their potential.
• Business solutions KSAE– High levels of understanding longer-term business advantages of coaching and mentoring on people's ability to excel in their job.
• Relational KSAE– High levels of communication and empathy ability to be able to effectively initiate and maintain a coaching and mentoring initiative for identified staff.

Two examples of coaching are presented. First, A09 brought up a useful point about political astuteness in dealing with important stakeholders from research undertaken on a seminal PA in Australia. His comment is about skills required to handle stakeholders in complex situations. This is typical example of the kind of KSAE that may be required, is rare, and may need expert help that a coach or mentor could provide for somebody facing this situation. Second is a quote from P28 about a PA that he was an ALT member on.

…it's about a certain level of political astuteness. This is where [wise person X] was a really intelligent political player and he asked the right political questions of the alliance. So he'd say “if the auditor-general comes to you and says ‘you have said this, this, and that,’ what are you going to say to him, because this is what you've just promised in this meeting room,” right? And they go…they don't know how to answer, because they're not politically…these are engineers. What would an engineer know? You imagine an engineer, the sorts of engineers that you and I would know, talking to 12 hippies who actually aren't really hippies, they are not in my backyard [NIMBY syndrome people] and they look like hippies, but they're fathers and they're husbands and they're wives or barristers and QCs and…right? And this engineer's got to tell them why they're going to go for a cheaper carbon scrubber next to their school for the tunnel. How's that engineer going to start that conversation?

The client was very much an active and respected member of the AMT so there was no railroading of the client or anything like that. They spent a lot of time, they did their own training and mentoring, and even to the end of the project or probably halfway through the project, they brought on their own personal coach just to individually challenge each other. Not really the AMT as a team, but she spent a lot of time just challenging the individuals themselves. I found this lady quite confronting in her style, but they seemed to grow and really continued to grow right throughout the project. Most of them have been promoted and gone on to more senior leadership roles in their home organisations or other organisations out of it, because by the end of it they were a really strong business group.

In terms for discussions about a need for mentoring and or/coaching that was not provided but would have been useful to be provided, P30 made the following comments:

I inherited some alliances when I became executive director of major projects having come from road safety. So some alliances were already live and it was part of my role to step into those alliances in taking over from [person X], and [person X] moved into the chief operating officer role, so he started to step back from his role in alliances and I took over. I really wasn't sure what I was in for. I'd heard a little bit from [person X] about what they're like and that, but that was from a distance, so to speak. But yeah, dropping into them it was interesting, and I think I made a comment to one or two alliances that it would have been good if there was some induction for new ALT members, that's something that I found we haven't been really good at. So it's a really sharp introduction into what is the alliance, and this is where we're at so far. So a bit of an induction would have been good in my opinion so I was up a steep learning curve. I was just sort of overwhelmed at the beginning, too, with the Section of information that was coming.

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

• Participants understand the importance of the role that transparency plays in building trust and mutual commitment toward clear project goals and aims.
• Participants understand the rationale of transparency in demonstrating that opportunistic behaviour is not occurring, particularly when developing a TOC or project duration forecast.
• Participants understand and can justify the rationale for open book in terms of reduced transaction costs associated with verifying proprietary information and data.
• Participants are clear in their intentions and approaches, and understand the level of trust propensity of others they deal with, and they think deeply about how they can assure the project owner and other project partners that their processes and communication forms support gaining and maintain credibility and trust in them.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence relating to identifying, defining, and measuring all project aspects requiring transparency.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of business integrity and application of governance measures to assure openness and transparency.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathy ability to be able to effectively create and maintain high trust levels.

In developing the TOC for a project in Sweden, A16 stated that his observation of a massively complex project to scope that was highly uncertain and difficult to scope and estimate cost/time, but the project had an immovable completion date. After unsuccessfully trying to tender the project, the project owner ended up deciding upon a highly integrated form of partnering between the project owner and a main contractor.

But it worked quite well and one of the things I realised that was extremely important was the dialogue that the project organisation had with all the stakeholders. 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 [PO X] and [Contractor A] within the project organisation, but with every subcontractor…

I didn't mention that, but every subproject, one of these routes that was sent as an order to the project organisation, after they'd done the mapping and all the negotiation and so on, they calculated the cost of it, on the basis of how the land might look and how much distances was and so on and so on? And then they decided that the budget for it, in an agreement between world partners in the project, just saying, “Okay, let's agree that this will cost $1.6 million.” And after that they had a gain share or pain share of plus/minus five per cent from that negotiated. So they knew that we need to negotiate this as close as possible to what we think it will be, and it wasn't a “you and I” or “we and them” relationship, it was, “We need to try to figure out how close or how much this will cost.”

In terms of the BAU approach with transparency about costs in an open-book approach, P06 observes a potential problem with this:

But the problem that you've got with these things is the dodges, then they have the contract says 2 ½% main contractors’ discount, but they may have a side deal with a letter that you never see that gives 5%. There's all those sorts of issues.

Apart from financial transparency, an important element of transparency is clarity of understanding between people and organisations.

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.

And in taking an example that started as a design alliance then went into the delivery phase as a competitive tender based on a TOC and a negotiated fixed-fee profit margin with negotiations after the contractor was on board to explore innovations and cost reductions, P35 stated that:

I'm not party to how [PO X] assessed our tender to them, but in the development of our price that they accepted for the construction phase that was all open book and fully scrutinised by the independent estimator.

It was a select tender, if you like, competitive-based and [PO X] was involved in all of those processes. So they were fully informed and advised as to who we went to tender, they saw the tender documents go out, the prices come back and then after the submission of our lump sum price they had full visibility on how the price was developed.

…another thing that I would say was well considered in the development of the contract and its framework was that the construction wasn't to start until the project was adequately, or rather not adequately, but well-defined and we knew, [Contractor A] knew, that there would be very little opportunity for variation or increased scope. So there was a lot of effort put into accurately defining and pricing the project.

So straight away after the turning out of the $92 million budget cost, we did a value engineering workshop where we're looking for innovation as well as adjustments to specification to bring the price down, and that process went for probably nearly three months to revisit the design and reduce the cost. Through that process there were lots of things that were done to reduce the price.

In the Design for Life U.K. Framework agreement document it states that:

Without clarity of agreed sensible margins, separated from the cost element of the “price,” the elements of cost can never be fully identified so that effort can be focused on reducing each in turn until the lowest cost is arrived at without affecting the target margin. So, the best practices by which costs can be managed, ideally on an open book basis, are rarely implemented and, even when they are attempted, run into the difficulty that the industry simply has no cost data on which to work other than “rates” which are inadequate for the purpose.

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.

• Participants understand the importance of the role that accountability plays in building trust and mutual commitment toward clear project goals and aims.
• Participants understand the rationale of accountability in demonstrating that opportunistic behaviour is not occurring.
• Participants are clear in their intentions and approaches and demonstrate high levels of integrity about decisions and actions they take.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence relating to understanding how to best demonstrate and communicate what they do, so that decisions and actions can be intelligently challenged and questioned to prompt improvement and beneficial innovation.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of business integrity and application of openness and transparency to engender trust and confidence.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathic ability to be able to effectively demonstrate their decisions and actions to prompt evaluation and questioning that may lead to improvement and beneficial innovation.

In an example from a water utilities programme alliance the respondent was questioned about how extraordinary events were dealt with, for example major floods or bushfires, etc. The answer provided some insights about open-book interpretation of “facts and figures” as well as what may constitute and extraordinary event.

…there's a provision for extraordinary events so at the end of every year, in the wash-up of the budget, they can identify and they don't necessarily have to be big expensive one-off events, they're encouraged to not just look for big one-offs that they go, well that's extraordinary, it's more about the event itself and whether it was an extraordinary event and unexpected, and the partner companies shouldn't be punished for something that was completely unpredicted or unpredictable in a normal year. So there is a provision

There was documentation of expectations early on and also at the time of TOC, but I think value has been achieved less by trotting out a statement and then matching the statement more with the process that we followed, particularly for developing the TOC. But also with the culture that we created in the alliance, I think we made it very clear, very early on that this wasn't a sort of cashed-up kind of operation that we're, that you know things will be scrutinised and we will be evaluating whether things are worth, whether it's worth spending money on things, and I really am glad that we did that early on, I know there was a fair bit of grumbling from some of the people in the office about, what do you mean we're not going to have this, we always have this perk to negotiate that and back it out of the calculation for whether there is a pain share or a gain share. To be honest, that's quite a difficult exercise because obviously they will put lots of things on the table that they think are unpredictable, and so it comes down to how skilled everyone is at negotiating and providing substantiation and then governance for how you divvy that up. So that's part of my job is the governance of it all and documenting and providing evidence and so what I've been doing is encouraging, as I work with the alliances, encouraging them to consider throughout the year what might be extraordinary, rather than waiting until the end of the year and getting the evidence together at the time. It's much harder in August next year to be thinking about something that happened in August this year. or that perk or whatever, what do you mean you're scrutinising this cost; well, we are, and we have to because we don't have a lot of money, and that sort of culture though starts to pervade people's thinking, and it means that when they're considering variation requests from subcontractors are the things that are keeping things in perspective. So from a perspective of value, I think, yeah at the end of this project when we're having to prove to Treasury, yes we've achieved value for money, I'm very confident about that.

The national guidelines require value-for-money statements to be prepared in advance of going to the marketplace to form an alliance. So the client needs to be very clear about what is the value for money and then we deduce a whole big document on value for money before we proceeded to select partners or potential partners for the [Project X] and the [Project Y]. And there's also a requirement that when you reach practical completion of your alliances, that the client needs to prepare a value-for-money report to demonstrate what has been achieved.

In terms of transparency and benchmarking, P48 had something very interesting to say about the value of a highly sophisticated and knowledgeable PO/POR who had intimate knowledge about what questions to ask and therefore how transparency could have a deep, rather than shallow, value and meaning.

Well, in terms of value for money, I had three or four guys in the development of each of the TOCs, I had three or four guys in my group which were generally accounting for the rest of the jobs on the program, all the hard dollar jobs, so I used them to benchmark each of the TOCs in through about four or five different stages in the development of the TOCs, in terms of all the hourly rates and man-hours per job and all the direct costs, so I benchmarked that all the way through to the development of the TOC, so that when we came to the – so when the final TOC was presented to the ALT, I had a whole lot of benchmarks for the ALT to look at and compare when we were going through the TOCs, because the ALT, it would have been the first time a lot of those guys have ever done anything like that before in their lives, so I took them away for about four days and just gave them my feelings in terms of the prices to expect in terms of rates, overhead – erection of overhead per kilometre, weighing of civil works per kilometre, so they all had these fundamental breakdowns in their minds when they went into the TOC review. Now we had two TOCs on two of the projects with the program presented to us within about three months of each other, we accepted the first one and rejected the second one.

Characteristics that shape the way that participants feel toward one another in collaborating, trusting, and committing to each other and their teams in a way that makes them dependent and integrated rather than working as independent and autonomous groups, teams, and individuals. Mechanisms that shape how participants are integrated to influence the extent to which they collaborate and are mutually bound in action-consequence loops.

• Participants can identify and understand how structures, processes, and behaviours they encounter produces a workplace ambience that drives or inhibits their mutual dependency and collaboration, and the degree to which they take accountability for the impact of their actions upon one another.
• Participants empathise with fellow participants and any difficulties they may face, and seek out ways in which to ease that burden within limitations and constraints of the RBP approach while remaining committed to promote joint best-for-project outcomes.
• Participants clearly understand the impact that others may have on their capacity to deliver best-for-project outcomes and what they need to do to ensure that they can jointly deliver to or beyond project KRAs.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence relating to understanding dependency interfaces and interconnectivity of participant actions.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of business integrity and systems knowledge to be able to appreciate business/technical/PM interfaces and interaction.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of ability for communication and empathy to be able to effectively gain mutual understanding between teams and individuals of their interdependency and how they can best sink or swim together.

A01 raised a point about trade-offs in a lifecycle cost context, but it is applicable to mutual dependency. That project required a build and maintain solution and so the capital cost and running costs were then entwined and interdependent. This illustration is useful for understanding that characteristic of mutual dependency. It also shows that the project owner had a responsibility and duty for a project solution that illustrates what happens when there is a tradeoff in scope and cost between project owner and project delivery team.

…they tried to introduce your new type of asphalt that needed hardly any maintenance but was very expensive. So that was a sole discretion, the trade-off between product and number of maintenance days that that was so in this competitive dialogue for the tunnel project also.

…But the rail, yes, authority is in principle responsible, yes, for they are responsible that the maintenance will be well organised by the markets.

The rationale behind project teams realising their project interdependencies and necessary trade-off of interests is illustrated by the following quotes about project characteristics:

Any sort of discussions are very important because while at the end of the day whatever decision we make, we've all got to own it and we've all got to, you know, the cost impact or the time impact or the quality impact or the design impact, whatever way the decision goes, in that instance everybody wears that and there is that sort of collective view, but it's important, I think, that everyone brings their own perspective to those discussions too. So it's not sort of groupthink, that's not what it's about.

I think it's part of a no-blame culture and it's part of the fact that they were in it together. 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.

Another characteristic of mutual dependence is branding of a single project delivery team and the way that it binds people together into a “project tribe.”

…we spent a lot of time in making sure that we were just seen as one entity and they were part of that entity until they left the alliance. Even little things, like you were never allowed to drive a car which had one of your home organisations…Had a symbol on it, you wear the same clothes all the time, you have the same thing, we had a lot of pressure in making sure that everybody was part of that entity and felt that they were one entity, and it was one culture in developing that culture…. It was sink or swim, it was forming a team which had a really challenging job which motivated itself.

You could go into our alliance office, so at the peak we had in our alliance office about 90 people and I could tell you, you couldn't pick who was from the parent companies. It was very much an integrated model, so we spent a lot of effort in terms of building the team. And that's worked extremely effectively.

Specific mechanisms and processes that shape the way that participants feel toward one another in collaborating, trusting, and committing to each other and their teams in a way that makes them dependent and integrated, rather than working as independent and autonomous groups, teams and individuals.

• Participants understand how structures, processes and behaviours that they encounter result in mutual dependency, encouraging collaboration and accountability for the impact of their actions upon one another.
• Participants support and leverage enabling structures, processes, and behaviours that they encounter that result in mutual dependency encouraging collaboration and accountability for the impact of their actions upon one another.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence relating to actively enhancing structures, processes and behaviours that enable interdependency and interconnectivity (sink or swim together) of participant actions.
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of business integrity and systems knowledge to be able to enhance business/technical/PM advantages to interdependency interaction (sink or swim together) of participant actions.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathy ability for teams and individuals to be able to effectively enhance a sink-or-swim-together collaborative mode of working.

One enabler of a sink or swim together is recognition of the challenge of highly complex interfaces and the ability to develop mechanisms, structures, and methods of collaborating to effectively enhance collaboration.

Typically a tunnel might be commissioned in the last two or three months, but the sheer size of this particular tunnel required us to start commissioning six months out, and that meant six months out while we're still building some of it, so again not the luxury of stopping work and then handing over to the commissioning team. These were some, I suppose, of the input drivers for looking at smarter models.

…so we have the alliance manager and I guess one of the big advantages of having the alliance was that we had an alliance manager who had to become intimately familiar with the whole M&E [mechanical and electrical] scope and what the challenges were for the M&E team, etc., etc., had some influence in the project management, the bigger project, and had some influence in what they did. Whereas [X] is the subcontractor wouldn't be able to influence the civil work at all, the alliance manager was able to influence it in some ways to the benefit of the alliance, for the M&E scope.

I think if we talk about this particular alliance, it was set up because of those risks that we talked about in the start where we had traditionally the M&E contractor coming in conflict with the civil contractor, working in that confined space at the same time. I think it solved a lot of those issues reasonably well in that we had a team that was working as one. The smaller party in that team, [X]—there was a pain/gain formula but they had limited exposure so they could comfortably provide the resources needed to get the job done without constantly going back into the contractual mode. We had an alliance manager who could exert some influence over the overall project, giving M&E a voice that they wouldn't have had under a subcontract model. So for those reasons I think it worked reasonably well.

The way the job was set up with all the support, some of the people finishing works into the M&E fit-out of the tunnel, but I mean, 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.

And on the driver or enhancer of having a team with a culture attuned to collaboration and sink or swim -together. Strong authentic leadership traits seem to be one enabler, the ability to guide and serve the team that delivers the project.

You had the disciplines of the alliance leader, you've got the clients representative, you've got the construction, you've got the design interface manager, and you've got your business manager, your quality person and the safety person. It wasn't a big AMT, but it was very, very focussed and they were very, very visible onsite, and they were always around at a number of activities we had. They were expected to be there, but they just did that as part of being proud members of the team. We were very lucky in getting some really high-quality people in the AMT.

One aspect of a sink-or-swim-together arrangement is to get the project in the first place. In this quote from P48, he recalls how an unsuccessful proponent team responded to the need to pull together, to pool all intellectual effort for innovation, and to arrive at a feasible proposal.

The second TOC [PA X] ever presented the ALT was rejected, so they were absolutely deflated and I said “We're not expecting business as usual, we expect you to go away, we expect you to be clever, and we expect you to come up when the bloody price is right and be innovative,” so they went away and spent a month on it, and they came back and they'd stripped $100 million out of it and we got the right price and the right approach. That had a big impact on the way the place worked, particularly the management; the alliance management team.

So certainly that's one of the pillars of an alliance agreement, we're all in this together, and we had a charter, we put ourselves together and made up a charter. Again, you know the pragmatic constructors didn't see the point of sitting down for a day and coming up with a charter, because they knew what would be on it anyway. It didn't take long though to convince them that the purpose wasn't to get the charter; the purpose was to sit down for the day together. So we did that, and one of the key points in the charter was everyone's in this together, we all win, we all lose together.

Again, how it manifested itself, well how it didn't—the sort of the other way around, again, no siloing. Siloing sort of raised its head early, but we cleaned that up fairly quickly with structural changes, and made sure that we had a good spread across all disciplines, or across all teams, sub-teams within the alliance. So that worked to reinforce that whole sink-or-swim-together attitude.

I think the sink or swim question, we were pretty strong from the beginning, strong leadership, so the alliance manager…. we were always thinking of [PO X] as a client, but it was more the whole attitude of working together was like, almost like a business unit. Here's our KPIs, here's our goals, here's what we're moving toward and it was, all the discussion was around that. So I think if that's directed from alliance management and then particularly from your alliance manager then that's, it really starts there.

Generally these are the reverse of the 16.2 enablers. However, they are more about processes, structures, and attitudes or workplace culture that tends to foster individualism over collectivism so that teams may each feel high committed to a best-for-project outcome, but their interpretation and meaning of this is purely based on their personal view of performance and of their performance and not on how their actions contributes to or hinders the whole team's performance.

• Participants understand how structures, processes, and behaviours that they encounter result in mutual dependency, encouraging collaboration and accountability for the impact of their actions upon one another, and make a special effort to ensure that their actions and performance is in synch with other participants, and that they do not undermine the performance of others as a consequence of their individually focussed performance.
• Participants understand that a sink-or-swim-together culture is mutually beneficial and provides valuable social capital to work together as a single focussed integrated team, and that they should be on guard to identify and remedy any structures, processes, and actively counter behaviours that inhibit a sink-or-swim together project delivery culture.

• Technical and PM KSAE – High levels of technical and PM competence relating that actively inhibit the impact of structures, processes and behaviours that promote participant actions of interdependency and interconnectivity (sink or swim together).
• Business solutions KSAE – High levels of business integrity and systems knowledge to be able to counter actions that inhibit interdependency interaction (sink or swim together) of participant actions business/technical/PM.
• Relational KSAE – High levels of communication and empathy ability for teams and individuals to be able to effectively counter systems and actions that inhibit a sink-or-swim-together collaborative mode of working.

One potential inhibitor of a sink-or-swim-together workplace culture is often the processes, policies, performance and reward incentives, etc., that act as barriers to people looking out for each other and to collaborate freely to achieve best long-term and sustainable value. This may be a legacy of systems used by participants in a project that cannot be harmonised, or it may be simply that participants cannot fully comprehend the impact that their operating procedures and processes has on other participants and how it inhibits collaboration.

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.

…for example, the procurement managers would source things from the supply chain against technical criteria; like responsible sourcing or performance criteria in use or price. But all of those decisions will bear no relationship at all to say what the business development had understood about the client needs, and they weren't connected. So they couldn't develop an aligned value proposition at all at bid stage, and most of them weren't talking to the bid managers either. So the ability to alliance well with others, it doesn't mean it doesn't work but what I am saying—after a fashion—but what I am saying is that if you want to have alliances that help to maximise value, that's hampered by the lack of alliance, the lack of integration internally within each contractor organisation.

…when you come from a culture at the [Project X] which has been for the last 10 years of collaboration, teamwork and actually, and theatre actually operates on the spot and people think it's not particularly soft, it's pretty tough, it's pretty hard to get results. You've got less money and you don't have money to throw around, so therefore there's a lot of fairly sophisticated behaviours and things that happen in theatre to get the very clever outcomes that we see which, and I'll keep on trying to say, is that it's just a very different, lots of different cultures in there and trying to get them operating together. So it's been, I think it's been the best way to go having an alliance, but I think it's been really hard and I think we've underestimated how much. I think our teams would have been too small, everybody probably says that, but there's only been through the thick of it all there's only really three, four of us trying to, I mean, corral all that stuff that's going on.

I mean we started off commissioning on construction that was incomplete, and it took quite an amount of work in order to convince people further up the tree that the construction work actually wasn't complete, that the only way we could end progressing was by actually taking on the incomplete construction work, and when you start reporting all sorts of the associated numbers in relation to completing work, you can imagine the attention that that starts drawing, when you start exceeding various critical numbers you've put forward, if you know what I'm saying.

Finally, countering hubris by a PO/POR or NOP may be essential for a sink-or-swim-together situation. P48 provides a colourful quote relating to a rail programme alliance consisting of multi-billion dollar investments.

…Technical reasons, operations reasons, a whole bunch of reasons, so we had to go back and tell our client they were wrong from day one and that took some balls from the ALT.

…Well, that original discussion that we had with [PO], that they don't know everything, so we managed that as best we could and from there on in, we invited someone from [PO] to be on the ALT, so we then had buy-in from them as well, and we educated them on the basis from what railways are all about. It absolutely opened their eyes.