ORGANIZING COLLABORATION IN CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS – FORMAL MODELS MEETING PRACTITIONER PERCEPTIONS

misbe2011 Tracking Number 166

There is a call for new project management approaches that are able to deal with increased flexibility and put people aspects more in focus. In construction projects, formal models for relationship management are increasingly being used. However, these models are often applied and adapted to a specific context by project managers who are engineers with long experience from traditional contracting but little formal behavioural or leadership education. Based on case studies of Swedish partnering projects, this paper discusses how project managers approach this new challenge of integrating formal systems for relationship management with core project processes. Which aspects of the formal partnering models are stressed and implemented, and which are less focussed? How are general project processes affected by partnering goals? Which partners are involved and which models are chosen for incentivizing collaboration? What type of knowledge do project managers rely on in making choices about organization and contracts? The findings indicate that project managers have strong personal, experience-based perceptions of how collaboration is best enhanced and their own role in this process. The practices they introduce are often successful, but also tend to be patchy and related to collaboration problems in traditional contracts. The formal partnering processes, on the other hand, seem to be important in providing a basic structure for collaboration and to communicate collaborative intents, but are too general and infrequent to address more specific and pressing problems of process design and organization. We conclude that integrating relational and collaborative competence with project management knowledge still constitutes a significant improvement opportunity in many construction projects and discuss how these competencies may be merged.