Report on relationship management and culture change
Authors
Publication date
1 November 2005
Publisher
CRC for Construction Innovation
Abstract
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