Project Management Practices for Common-Pool Resources

Abstract

In the last few years, multi-party construction arrangements have been implemented successfully to deliver both private and public projects, in an effort to overcome the inefficiencies of traditional contracting. This has brought along new challenges for this type of project delivery system, such as the effective integration of the project partners, and the management of shared project resources.
This study’s objective is to examine the project management practices implemented in these multi-party construction projects to manage the project’s organization and its shared resources, analyze how these influence various project outcomes and relate them to the theories of governance of common-pool resources and organizational framework models.
To achieve this, 27 construction project case studies from the literature, mostly of the project alliancing and integrated project delivery types, were reviewed in detail and their performance in the implementation of 40 project management practices qualitatively assessed. This information was compiled into a database to perform simple qualitative and systematic qualitative comparative analyses of different configurations of practices identified.
The results of these analyses showed that in terms of strategy, the implementation of a multi-party construction arrangement alone explained the successful outcomes for the majority of cases studied, given the observed variability in practices. This suggests that either the collaborative approach to project delivery is in itself what allowed these projects to achieve their goals or that the sample of project cases obtained is biased in the portrayal of these project delivery methods as mostly cases of success.
For other aspects of these organizations, participants excelled in establishing integrated teams to manage the execution of the projects, implementing transparent project monitoring tools, and laying out collective decision-making processes to avoid conflicts.
Meanwhile, these projects were also observed as having some issues with the prevalence of the owners in the setting of goals and the decision-making, the recruitment of experienced partners and the pain-gain sharing mechanisms employed. Regardless of this, the high level of satisfaction among project participants indicates the potential that collaborative projects have.