Towards Agile Contracting: Enabling agile project management through contracting in the construction industry

‘Agile1’ or ‘Agility’ currently is a popular expression within project management. Agile project management is a method to meet the ever-changing needs and requirements throughout a project. An agile approach requires small multi-disciplinary development teams, working iteratively and in close collaboration with the client. This project management approach is developed in the information technology (IT) industry in the 1990’s. Since then, agile gets more and more attention from different industries; the construction industry is no exception. More and more guidelines and tools appear in literature to manage projects in an agile manner. Yet, contractual guidelines suited for an agile approach in construction industry are currently missing. Ample research has been conducted on contracts for projects that use conventional project management, like the ‘waterfall approach’. But due to a different management style, agile project management may not be compatible with these existing construction contracts. This gap in knowledge resulted in the following research question. How to effectively enable agile project management through construction contracts? The scope of this research is the front-end development phase of construction projects between client – engineer, consultant or architect (hereafter referred to as supplier). The following activities were conducted to find an answer to the research question: literature review, exploratory interviews, development of an agile contract proposal, validation and synthesis of the findings.Civil Engineering | Construction Management and Engineerin