Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) Approaches for Public Project Owners

Abstract

Traditional project delivery methods, including, for example, design-bid-build with unit price contracting, open bidding, and owner quality control, facilitate transparent checks and balances. One shortcoming of traditional methods is that contractors who carry out the projects are not involved in developing them. The growth of increasingly more complex projects demands alternative and evolving project delivery methods to ensure appropriate project delivery, contract compliance, and quality assurance. One of these evolving approaches is early contractor involvement (ECI). ECI is defined in this thesis as involving the contractor during the early phase of projects.

According to the literature, ECI has several advantages. However, public owners must confront several barriers when they attempt to involve the contractor during the early phase of in their projects. These barriers primarily arise from the fact that the practices involved differ from traditional business practices. Of particular importance are formal barriers to the implementation of ECI, such as international and national legislation. Predominantly, public owners must face major challenges if they want to involve the contractor during the early phase of a project because the contractor selection methods involved typically defy established standards. Furthermore, public owners are obliged to use competitive and transparent contractor selection procedures based on both price and quality. They are also obliged to treat all tenderers with equality. Fulfilling such obligations is challenging, even with traditional project delivery methods. Thus, it becomes additionally challenging when this set of procurement requirements occurs concurrently with ECI.

The purpose of this thesis is to understand more about how to involve the contractor in the early phase of public projects in order to develop suggestions for the success of future projects. 1) What do public owners do to involve the contractor in the early phase of projects? 2) What are the experiences with involving the contractor in the early phase of projects? 3) What measures ought to be implemented in future projects using ECI? What measures ought to be implemented in future projects using ECI?

In order to address these research questions, three groups of case studies were conducted on three topics. The three topics were early contractor involvement (ECI), competitive dialogue (CD), and best value procurement (BVP). In addition to reviewing the literature and the document study, 64 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with key professionals from 32 cases selected from Norway and The Netherlands were conducted.

This Ph.D. thesis is based on three journal papers and one conference paper: this thesis is the binding, conclusive essay for these papers. Each of the three publications addresses different topics relevant to early contractor involvement (ECI). The research is based on a qualitative, multiple-case studies approach, with knowledge taken from practitioners to achieve an in-depth understanding of ECI. Following the initial literature study, semi-structured interviews with key actors from the selected cases were conducted in addition to a document study of selected cases.

There are several views regarding ECI. The view of this thesis is that ECI consist of involving the contractor in the early phase of a project. No one single formula exists to involve the contractor in the early phase of projects. Instead, several approaches exist to involve the contractor in the early phase of projects. The approaches vary depending on how many contractors are involved, how and why they are involved, in which phase they are involved and what kind of contract arrangement is used.

During the first group of case studies and literature review, 23 unique approaches to ECI were identified (16 from the literature and seven new from case projects). The findings provide a new direction for ECI by introducing new approaches to ECI identified from the case projects.

As one of the approaches to ECI, competitive dialogue (CD) procurement procedure is explored in this thesis in detail. CD is a relatively new procurement procedure that was introduced in 2004 by the European Parliament for particularly complex contracts. Public procurement regulations vary from country to country, even if all countries in Europe were to follow the EU public procurement directives. Procurement practices vary even more between countries. Experiences with the use of new procurement procedures are thus country specific. CD is a novel procurement procedure in Norway, and thus far,