Transition in Adopting Project Delivery Method with Early Contractor Involvement

Recently asset owners have been investigating alternative delivery models for construction projects that offer improvements in value for money and project delivery time. One of these methods is the early contractor involvement (ECI) strategy. In this strategy a contractor is engaged before commencement of the construction work to give input during design. After the design, the construction work is negotiated with the contractor. Implementation of this new delivery strategy can raise issues with involved parties in the industry. To find these transitional issues, expectations and opinions were collected from practitioners from the three involved parties—owners, designers, and contractors—who had experience with ECI. The results show that all parties agreed in expecting improvements in quality and innovation and that the costs needed to adopt this system were not significant. Owners and contractors opined that the design phase could be expedited; however, the designers argued that any time savings were negated by increased collaboration and negotiation between the parties. There was also disagreement on risk allocation during construction. Contrary to the other parties, the contractors did not perceive the allocation of risk to them to be greater than with traditional procurement systems. Finally there was disagreement about whether the necessary collaborative culture was present in the construction industry for adopting “open book” costing, often practiced in ECI. It is recommended that for successful implementation of ECI, objectives in the areas of disagreement should be clarified between parties as they work through a transitional phase in adopting the ECI procurement method.