Road sector experiences on project delivery methods

Globally, innovative delivery methods involving broader service packages are increasingly used in infrastructure projects. In addition to construction and technical design also; financing, operation and maintenance for a certain period of time may be integral parts of the contract. This change is driven by the clients' quest to focus on their core business - securing adequate infrastructure - and by the clients' and the contractors' aim to increase their benefits. At the same time, the number of alternative project delivery methods is increasing making it more difficult for the client to select an appropriate method. As a result, decisions to use any of the alternative project delivery methods are often subjective. There is an evident lack of consolidated knowledge about the specific merits of these alternative routes. To assist strategic decision making on the best project delivery methods for future project delivery, the research concentrated on gathering data on the performance of different road project delivery methods. Data was gathered on the performance of the traditional Design-Bid-Build (DBB) and the Design-Build (DB), Construction Management (CM) and Design-Build-Maintain (DBM and its variants DBOM, DBFO, BOOT, etc.) project delivery systems in road construction in Finland, UK, Australia, New Zealand and USA. The main source of information were semi-structured interviews of the main market actors (clients, contractors, designers, consultants and researchers). Additionally an extensive literature review was done to supplement and verify the data provided by the interviewees. The data was then used as the basis for the actual performance analysis presented in the second report 'The Current and Future Performance of Road Project Delivery Methods'. It seems that the problems experienced with DBB have led to increased use of DB and DBM in the countries of interest. These project delivery methods help deliver projects in time and to budget while also reducing other experienced problems (adversarial relationships, etc.). However, there seem to be some problems even with DB (reduced quality, etc.) and DBM (reduced client flexibility, etc.). Solutions to these problems are sought by largely similar actions taken or planned in the different countries. Alliancing also seems to provide an interesting alternative for complex and large projects. Use of CM in road construction is marginal.