Readers of Management, Procurement and Law will have witnessed in recent weeks the devastation caused by the earthquake in Nepal. We see the impact this natural disaster has had on the people of Nepal, and the role that civil engineers, supporting the many aid agencies, are now playing in helping the country to recover. When we consider the role of civil engineers, it is very much focussed on innovating, designing and building in order to provide the infrastructure to improve the world we live in today. This issue of Management, Procurement and Law focuses on a number of these themes and explores ways to improve how we procure, deliver and contract to ensure the delivery of successful projects.
The issue begins with two briefing papers: Gerrard (2015) considers the impact of low-cost bidding and Patterson et al. (2015) give an overview of the changes in the UK Construction (Design and Management) Regulations and their interface with NEC forms of contract.
In February 2011, 185 lives were lost in an earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. The earthquake caused widespread damage and disruption to the vital infrastructure of the city. Botha and Scheepbouwer (2015) give a detailed insight into how the rebuilding of Christchurch has been structured, and the alliancing methods and delivery structures that have been used to ensure that the rebuilding is successful. The paper analyses the structure of the delivery organisation and highlights how this structure has encouraged collaboration, reduced risk and improved trust and commitment from the alliancing parties. The paper also highlights how such a structure, when embraced by all parties, can drive innovation and ultimately deliver greater value for the client organisations. It concludes that the alliancing method adopted could be used on other disaster recovery programmes and even very large projects.
Unfortunately, not all projects are delivered successfully, and when this occurs we are often faced with painful and protracted arbitration or litigation cases. Jarratt (2015) introduces the concept of mediation as an alternative method to settling disputes, and highlights how mediation is now seen as a viable and more successful method when attempting to resolve dispute situations. The paper introduces the idea of the mediator becoming the facilitator of communication between the disputing parties, taking ownership to ensure trust and communication are used in order to build bridges. The paper highlights two cases where mediation has been used (with ultimately differing outcomes) and concludes that mediation is faster and less costly than more traditional forms of dispute resolution, and is now becoming a highly successful form of dispute resolution that is ‘here to stay’.
Ojiako et al. (2015) explore in their paper the difficulties of using collaborative governance in infrastructure project delivery, and in particular in the use of public–private partnership (PPP) contracts. The paper analyses the outputs of interviews held with senior managers involved in the delivery of collaborative projects in Greece, highlighting what collaborative governance means and the benefits of its use. The paper particularly focuses on the need for deep relationships, mutual trust and transparency between project stakeholders in order to achieve the desired project outcomes. The paper concludes that collaborative governance is designed to encourage consensual decision making, and that this in turn is likely to lead to the successful delivery of complex PPP infrastructure projects. The outputs of the proposed future work in relation to this paper will no doubt be of interest to this journal in the future.
In our final paper, Carbonara et al. (2015) provide a conceptual tool to support contracting authorities in the design and choice of the tendering procedures in PPPs. The paper highlights how PPP contract procurement can be more uncertain than traditional contract forms, and that this in turn leads to increased transaction costs caused by competing and opportunistic behaviours of the contracting entities. The tool developed and described in the paper has therefore been designed to minimise the transaction costs borne by the public sector, and takes into account a number of variables that will affect the transaction costs of a PPP contract. Within the paper, the tool is applied to an Italian toll road project and the outputs analysed and described, highlighting the practical application of the tool from which the authors draw their conclusions.
