Assembling A Collaborative Team - Other - Page 22
Assembling a Collaborative Project Team
and other new ways of determining cost and allocating risk) create challenges
in determining the best means of connecting the three entities of client, design
team and contractor and have also altered the dynamics within each entity.
There are many factors that now influence how a project team might be
assembled and there is no longer a ‘standard’ approach.
Defining traditional and contractor-led
project teams
New procurement routes have brought about significant changes in the
mechanisms used by clients to enter into Building Contracts with contractors.
While these may not have fundamentally altered the way that design work is
carried out, they have dramatically changed the means of allocating risks and
determining costs. Despite the multitude of procurement options that are
available, only two project team structures exist. As the Stage 1 outputs may
be developed differently depending on how the project team is to be structured,
one of the strategic tasks for a client during Stage 0 is to develop a clear
understanding of the differences between these team structures. The two
generic team structures are:
•
the traditional project team – in which the client appoints a design team to
produce a design and to develop it to a certain level of detail. A number of
contractors tender for the project with the successful contractor building
the project
• t he contractor-led project team – this project team is led by the contractor
with the design team forming part of the contractor’s team. A number of
contractors will bid for a project, based on a comprehensive brief, with the
winning tender being decided on the basis of design, cost and other factors.
Certain forms of procurement use a traditional project team during the early
project stages and then revert to a contractor-led team by replacing (or novating
– see page 19) the contractor as the client once the design has been developed
to a specified stage. Under this arrangement, the contractor becomes responsible
for all aspects of the design, including the work originally undertaken by the
design team for the client in the early stages. Some clients believe that this
results in ‘the best of both worlds’ as it enables them to deal directly with the
design team in the early stages yet allows them to transfer all of the design risk
to the contractor.
It is perhaps fair to say that the purest forms of contractor-led teams involve
the contractor before the Concept Design stage commences, with the purest
traditional project team involving the contractor at the latest possible point during
Stage 4. For example, in the latter scenario, the traditional project team would
tender for a contractor on the basis of all of the design work being completed.
In reality, contractor involvement will usually commence somewhere in between
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