Partnering and Collaborative Contracting

Introduction

Traditional adversarial contracting often leads to disputes, defensive behaviour and poor outcomes for everyone involved. Partnering and collaborative contracting approaches aim to align the interests of clients, contractors, consultants and suppliers so that they work together to solve problems, share risk and reward fairly and deliver better value.

This Partnering and Collaborative Contracting training course explains how collaborative models work in practice and how to make them succeed. Participants learn about partnering charters and principles, collaborative contract forms, early warning and joint risk management, target cost and pain-gain mechanisms, alliancing, governance structures, behaviours and trust, and how to measure the success of collaboration.

The course is relevant to construction, infrastructure, engineering and long-term service contracts.

Course Objectives

By the end of this training course, participants will be able to:

• Explain the principles and benefits of collaborative contracting
• Compare partnering, frameworks and alliancing models
• Understand collaborative contract forms and key mechanisms
• Apply early warning and joint risk management processes
• Design target cost and pain-gain share arrangements
• Establish governance structures for collaborative relationships
• Develop behaviours and trust that sustain collaboration
• Measure and improve collaborative performance

Target Audience

This training course is suitable for a wide range of professionals, including:

• Client project directors and sponsors
• Contract and commercial managers
• Contractor and consultant directors
• Project managers on collaborative projects
• Procurement professionals
• Alliance and partnership managers

Training Methodology

The course uses case studies of successful and unsuccessful collaborative projects, collaborative contract extracts and team exercises. Participants develop a partnering charter, design a pain-gain mechanism, run a joint risk workshop and practise collaborative problem solving in a simulated project scenario.

Target Competencies

• Collaborative model selection
• Collaborative contract understanding
• Joint risk management
• Incentive mechanism design
• Collaborative governance
• Trust and behaviour building

Day One: Why Collaboration Matters

• Problems with adversarial contracting
• Principles of partnering and collaboration
• Evidence of benefits from collaborative projects
• When collaborative approaches are appropriate
• Common reasons collaboration fails
• Client leadership in collaborative contracting
• Exercise: assessing readiness for collaboration

Day Two: Collaborative Models and Contracts

• Project partnering and partnering charters
• Strategic partnering and long-term frameworks
• Alliancing and integrated project delivery
• Collaborative standard contract forms in overview
• Early contractor involvement and two-stage processes
• Selecting partners on behaviours and capability
• Workshop: drafting a partnering charter

Day Three: Risk, Reward and Incentives

• Joint risk registers and risk reduction meetings
• Early warning mechanisms and their use
• Target cost contracts explained
• Designing pain-gain share mechanisms
• Key performance indicators and incentive payments
• Open book accounting and cost transparency
• Exercise: designing a pain-gain share arrangement

Day Four: Governance and Behaviours

• Collaborative governance boards and roles
• Integrated teams and co-location
• Building trust and psychological safety
• Collaborative problem solving and decision making
• Handling conflict within collaborative relationships
• Leadership behaviours that support collaboration
• Simulation: solving a project problem collaboratively

Day Five: Measuring and Sustaining Collaboration

• Measuring collaboration and relationship health
• Continuous improvement within partnerships
• Sharing lessons across projects and programmes
• Managing change in partner organisations
• Ending or renewing collaborative relationships
• Collaborative business relationship standards in overview
• Personal action plan for collaborative contracting