Report on client management

There can be many interpretations of relationship management. In this short report, we are concerned with relationships arising under an alliance project and in managing stakeholders under a more traditional approach to procurement. Each aspect is supported by an example project

Alliancing in Australia - No-Litigation Contracts: A Tautology?

A project alliance is a business strategy whereby client and commercial participants’ objectives are aligned. This paper takes an alliance project between public and private organizations in Queensland, Australia as a case study and reports the critical factors identified that influence the success of the alliance project. Alliancing is a system that provides a collaborative environment and a framework to adapt behavior to project objectives. It is about sharing resources and experiences, exposing the “hidden” risks. The case study suggests that leadership has a strong influence on the alliance climate. Commitment and action by the Project Alliance Board and, so, parent organizations have a strong impact on the team and alliance culture, indicating alliancing has a high chance of failure when there is inadequate support from top management. Like all relational contracting approaches, trust between alliance partners is important. This case study project takes a further step toward reinforcing the trust element by placing a No-Dispute clause in the alliance agreement. A review of the effects of the no-litigation clause upon the project team is presented. The writers conclude that without a positive approach to relationship management, a No-Dispute approach is impossible. Hence, they postulate that a “no-litigation” alliancing contract is essentially tautological, and go on to argue that a no-litigation contract cannot exist without the help of a clear relational vision, that leads to both soft and hard infrastructure to assist in decision making and relationship building

Success factors in an alliance contract: a case study in Australia

Many studies have been carried out in relation to construction procurement methods. Evidence shows that there needs to be a change of culture and attitude in the construction industry, moving away from traditional adversarial relationship into cooperative and collaborative relationship. At the same time there is also an increasing concern and discussion on alternative procurement methods, drifting away from traditional procurement systems. Relational contracting approaches have become more popular in recent years, and have appeared in common forms such as partnering, alliancing and relationship management contracts. This paper reports the findings of a survey undertaken with a private organisation based on an alliance project during its design stage, identifying the critical factors that influence the success of the alliance project. Legal aspects focusing on dispute resolution in alliancing are also highlighted.published_or_final_versio

PNRO Spring 2005

PNRO brings training Alaska ACO PNRO responds to Florida hurricanes Seattle good project update Inmate Dog Alliance project of Idaho PNRO, RAVS visit Nez Perce HSUS, Fund for Animals join forces Legislative Update We need anti-animal-fighting laws with teeth (Robert Reder

Report on relationship management and culture change

Brisbane Water (BW), a commercialised business arm of Brisbane City Council (BCC) entered into an alliance with a number of organisations from the private sector in order to design, construct, commission and undertake upgrades to three existing wastewater treatment plants located at Sandgate, Oxley Creek, and Wacol in Brisbane. The alliance project is called the Brisbane Water Environmental Alliance (BWEA). This report details the efforts of a team of researchers from the School of Management at Queensland University of Technology to investigate this alliance. This is the second report on this project, and is called Stage 2 of the research. At the time that Stage 2 of the research project was conducted, the BWEA project was nearing completion with a further 8 months remaining before project completion. The aim of this report is to explore individuals’ perceptions of the effectiveness and functioning of the BWEA project in the latter stages of the project. The second aim of this report is to analyse the longitudinal findings of this research project by integrating the findings from Stage 1 and Stage 2 of the project. This long-term analysis of the functioning and effectiveness of the alliance is important because at the current time, researchers have little knowledge of the group developmental processes that occur in large-scale alliances over time. Stage 2 of this research project has a number of aims including assessing performance of the BWEA project from the point of view of a range of stakeholders including the alliance board and alliance management team, alliance staff, and key stakeholders from the client organisation (Brisbane Water). Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 18 individuals including two board members, one external facilitator, and four staff members from the client organisation. Analysis involved coding the interview transcripts in terms of the major issues that were reported by interviewees

When the Balance Isn't Easy: A Case Study Exploring the Complications with Work-Life Balance Initiatives in the Australian Construction Industry

Studies of work and life balance often concentrate on the ways in which employees may require and use flexible work practices to cope with the demands of their other ‘non-work’ activities and responsibilities. This paper adds to our knowledge in this arena through presenting a case study of work-life balance. This case study focuses on managerial and employee issues in implementing organisational work life balance initiatives within the construction industry in Australia. For this case study, the workplace was an ‘alliance’ project, of four collaborating companies undertaking a large infrastructure project. The project management group determined that work-life balance was an important issue within the industry and consequently implemented a five-day instead of the industry standard six-day working week as a balance initiative for the workforce. A range of factors contributed to this five-day week initiative reverting to the original work schedule of a six-day working week. This paper explores these issues and analyses the competing priorities and demands of management in endeavouring to develop alternate strategies to maintain a positive work and life balance for employees. The analysis of this case suggests that management and employees were dedicated to improving work-life balance; however, a range of externalities resulted in not all initiatives being successful. Nevertheless, within the constrained choices, the management group instigated alternate initiatives

Final report implementation of relational management

Construction teams and construction organisations have their own distinctive cultures. There also exists an infrastructure, both social and contractual, which ensures that these projects within which the teams operate are completed successfully. It is these issues which this research has addressed. The project was instigated by Queensland Department of Main Roads, Public Works and John Holland Group in order to address how they might better implement relationship management (RM) on their construction projects. The project was devised initially in order to facilitate a change in culture which would allow the project to be run in a relational manner and would lead to effective performance in terms of the KPIs that the organisations set for themselves, described as business better than usual. This report describes the project, its outcomes and deliverable and indicates the changes that were made to the project during the research process. Hence, the initial premise of the project and the problem to investigate was the implementation of relational contracting: • throughout a range of projects; • with a focus on client body staff. The additions that were made to the project, and documented in the variations to the project, included two major additional areas of study: • client management and stakeholder management; • a live case study of an alliancing project. The context within which the research was undertaken is important. The research was driven by main roads with their desire to improve their operations by focusing on the relationship between the major project participants (however, stakeholder and client organisation management became an obvious issue as the research progressed, hence the variations). The context was initially focussed on main roads, public works and John Holland group organisations but it became clear very quickly that this was in fact an industry-wide issue and not an issue specific solely to the project participants. Hence, the context within which this research took place can be described as below: The deliverables from the project are a toolkit for determining RM needs in an organisation, a monograph describing the practical implementation of RM and the outline for a RM CPD and Masters cours

Results and achievements of the ALLIANCE Project: New network solutions for 5G and beyond

Leaving the current 4th generation of mobile communications behind, 5G will represent a disruptive paradigm shift integrating 5G Radio Access Networks (RANs), ultra-high-capacity access/metro/core optical networks, and intra-datacentre (DC) network and computational resources into a single converged 5G network infrastructure. The present paper overviews the main achievements obtained in the ALLIANCE project. This project ambitiously aims at architecting a converged 5G-enabled network infrastructure satisfying those needs to effectively realise the envisioned upcoming Digital Society. In particular, we present two networking solutions for 5G and beyond 5G (B5G), such as Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualisation (SDN/NFV) on top of an ultra-high-capacity spatially and spectrally flexible all-optical network infrastructure, and the clean-slate Recursive Inter-Network Architecture (RINA) over packet networks, including access, metro, core and DC segments. The common umbrella of all these solutions is the Knowledge-Defined Networking (KDN)-based orchestration layer which, by implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, enables an optimal end-to-end service provisioning. Finally, the cross-layer manager of the ALLIANCE architecture includes two novel elements, namely the monitoring element providing network and user data in real time to the KDN, and the blockchain-based trust element in charge of exchanging reliable and confident information with external domains.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under contract FEDER TEC2017-90034-C2 (ALLIANCE project) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2017SGR-1037 and 2017SGR-605.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version