Suitability of Project Alliancing for a customary apartment renovation: A case study

Frustration felt toward the opportunism inherent in traditional contracting has made the construction sector to develop new collaborative project delivery models globally. This is especially true in Australia, where Project Alliance has been introduced as a solution to the experienced problems. This model has been applied mostly in road, rail and water infrastructure projects. The building and real estate sector has hardly used the mode and exceptions include predominantly only few uniquely demanding landmark buildings involving a lot of uncertainty. More recently, owners in Finland have started to utilise Project Alliance. In addition to a few infrastructure projects one relatively standard/common apartment renovation project has been implemented in accordance with alliancing practices. The study will focus on this building project and experiences gained from it. More precisely, the objective of the study was to find out whether it makes sense to use Project Alliance in more common projects and on what conditions it benefits building construction involving more parties (i.e. technical experts and subcontractors) than a typical infrastructure project. Interviews with project’s participants had a role in the study and results from a survey to parties to the project were analysed broadly. In the presented case, key features of the Project Alliance contributed for high levels of collaboration between participants and enabled achieving very positive results. Thus, this research work allows concluding that the alliance was definitely worth applying at this relatively small renovation project, although several suggestions for modifications could be identified and should be incorporated in future projects.