A project team finds a way to simplify a design, shorten construction and save money. It sounds like an outcome everyone should welcome.
Commercially, the picture is less straightforward. The designer faces additional work. A specialist loses part of its package. The contractor reduces its own income while taking responsibility for an unfamiliar approach. The saving belongs to the project, but the consequences land in individual businesses.
We often describe collaboration as a matter of behaviour. Choose the right people, build trust and encourage everyone to work towards a common goal. Those things matter. But even good relationships come under pressure when doing the right thing for the project leaves one participant worse off.
Better use of project data gives us a stronger basis for addressing this. It supports realistic targets, clearer arrangements for sharing the benefits of improvement and better recognition of the organisations that contribute to successful delivery.
That last point deserves more attention. If clients want collaboration to become normal practice, delivering collaboratively needs to improve a supplier’s commercial prospects beyond the current project.
The limits of good intentions
Most people working on infrastructure projects want to deliver something they can be proud of. Yet considerable effort goes into establishing responsibility, defending assumptions and protecting commercial positions.
Much of that work is necessary within the arrangements people are working under. Businesses need to be paid for changes and cannot accept unlimited exposure. Nevertheless, we should question how much effort those arrangements direct towards protecting individual interests rather than improving delivery.
New Engineering Contract (NEC) has helped teams address problems earlier through early warnings, regular programme updates and prospective assessments of change. Its effectiveness also depends on procurement decisions, commercial incentives and how the contract is administered.
A team can follow the required processes while still facing a basic tension: a decision that benefits the project damages one participant’s margin.
NEC itself offers different commercial approaches, including the NEC4 Alliance Contract, which provides a multi-party arrangement around shared objectives. The important question is what the chosen arrangement rewards people for doing.
What is Integrated Project Delivery?
Integrated Project Delivery, or IPD, brings the client and key design and construction organisations together early, with commercial arrangements designed to support joint decisions.
The details vary, but shared financial risk and reward are common features, often supported by a multi-party agreement. Part of each participant’s return depends on how the project performs as a whole.
A contractor therefore has a stronger reason to propose an improvement even where it reduces its own package. Designers have a commercial interest in how their decisions affect construction. The client participates in resolving uncertainty alongside the delivery team.
The intention is to make decisions that improve the overall outcome commercially worthwhile for the organisations involved.
Working in the same office and holding collaborative workshops can help. Their value is much greater when the financial arrangements support the behaviour being encouraged.
Shared rewards need a credible starting point
Suppose a team agrees to share savings against a target cost. How good is the target?
Set it too generously and ordinary performance earns a substantial reward. Set it too tightly and participants lose confidence that the reward is attainable. Either outcome weakens the arrangement.
Programme targets present the same problem. A completion date can satisfy a funding requirement or public commitment without being supported by a deliverable sequence of work. Attaching an incentive to the date does not resolve the underlying problem.
This is where better evidence makes a practical difference.
Clients hold years of programmes, cost reports and change records. Contractors, consultants and specialists hold knowledge about productivity, resources and working methods. Bringing that evidence together creates a more credible starting point for negotiation.
Agreement will still require judgement. Better information gives that judgement a firmer foundation and helps the parties identify which assumptions need attention.
Have the difficult conversation earlier
Imagine that comparable design phases have taken fourteen to eighteen months, while a proposed programme allows nine.
That does not prove nine months is impossible. It does mean the team needs to explain what will be different.
Will requirements be settled earlier? Can a standard design be reused? Have approval arrangements changed? Are additional resources available, and can the work sensibly be divided between them?
These questions are easier to address before appointments and commitments become fixed. Once delivery is under way, challenging the date becomes entangled with responsibility for missing it.
Cost evidence should serve the same purpose. A benchmark identifies assumptions worth examining, but context matters. A bridge beside an operational railway faces different constraints from one on an open site. A recorded design duration may include months awaiting a decision.
A reasoned range, with the differences explained, gives the team something useful to work with. An apparently precise figure without that explanation risks giving an unrealistic target more authority.
Where AI helps
Much of the relevant information exists in forms that are difficult to compare: inconsistent activity descriptions, reports written for different purposes and explanations buried in meeting minutes.
AI can help extract and organise that material, making it easier to investigate why apparently similar packages produced different outcomes. People who understand the work will still need to validate the findings.
Clients’ records will also have gaps. Reported expenditure and progress often reveal little about the resources deployed or practical reasons behind a sequence. Delivery partners will continue to hold important knowledge.
Why should they share it?
If revealing an efficiency simply results in a lower price or a tougher target next time, withholding it makes commercial sense. Participants need confidence that contributing their knowledge will improve their own prospects as well as the project’s.
This is the connection between better data and the commercial model. Information helps establish credible targets; shared incentives give organisations a reason to improve on them. Each strengthens the value of the other.
Make collaboration worth sustaining
The incentive should extend beyond a single contract.
For clients with continuing investment programmes, future opportunity provides a powerful reason to invest in the success of the wider team. An organisation that consistently meets commitments, shares useful information and helps resolve problems should be able to demonstrate that contribution when competing for its next appointment.
The assessment must reflect the collective nature of delivery. A missed milestone should affect the shared project reward and prompt a joint recovery effort. Making every organisation’s future prospects depend on proving who caused the delay will recreate the defensive behaviour the arrangement is intended to reduce.
Instead, clients should assess observable commitments and contributions throughout delivery. Were risks raised promptly? Was information shared when needed? Were agreed actions completed? Did participants contribute to recovery and carry improvements through?
These are more useful questions than whether an organisation describes itself as collaborative in its tender.
They also allow constructive disagreement. Challenging an unrealistic assumption or raising an uncomfortable issue is often a valuable contribution to the project.
Persistent failure to fulfil agreed obligations should carry consequences. Those obligations need to be clear from the outset, with performance reviewed while there is still an opportunity to improve. Shared rewards give participants a reason to support each other; a formal record of their contributions gives that incentive a longer life.
The proposal is to make demonstrated delivery and collaborative behaviour a formal consideration in future procurement, through transparent arrangements consistent with the applicable rules. Under this approach, suppliers will have two connected reasons to contribute: a better return from the current project and stronger evidence for their next appointment.
A practical opportunity for the Midlands
The Midlands should test this approach at a manageable scale.
A small group of clients and delivery partners should select a recurring package or process, such as utility diversions or a defined design approval stage. They should compare records, investigate the variation and use the findings to establish targets for subsequent work.
Alongside those targets, they should agree how improvements will be rewarded and how contributions will be recorded. The trial will then test the whole proposition: whether better evidence supports more credible commercial arrangements, and whether those arrangements encourage people to share knowledge and improve delivery.
It will also reveal the practical work involved: which records are useful, where comparisons break down and what participants need to see before they trust the arrangement. That experience will provide a basis for applying the approach more widely.
The industry has spent years asking organisations to collaborate. We should give equal attention to the commercial reasons for doing so.
Better data gives us a stronger basis for agreeing what is achievable and recognising how participants contribute. Shared rewards make improvement commercially worthwhile today. Linking demonstrated collaboration to future opportunity gives suppliers a reason to sustain those behaviours across successive projects.
For the people delivering projects, that makes collaboration a much more convincing proposition.
This is a personal blog post. Any opinions, findings, and conclusion or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Centre for the New Midlands or any of our associated organisations/individuals.
ABOUT OUR AUTHOR:
Tom Wren is the Owner and Director of Plan-Analytics, a specialist consultancy he established in 2020. With a proven track record of driving some of the UK’s most significant infrastructure projects across rail, energy, defence, and healthcare, Tom is a leading voice in project delivery and innovation. At Plan-Analytics, he heads a high-performing team of project planners dedicated to delivering excellence in programme recovery, digital reporting, and advanced project technology.
