Page 24 - Civil Engineering Project Management, Fourth Edition

The development of construction procedures
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supported by the DETR’s Construction Best Practice Programme; the Govern-
ment National Audit Office’s report on Modernising Construction, January 2001;
and the Local Government Task Force’s publication Rethinking Construction:
Implementation Guide, August 2001, which gave over one hundred recommen-
dations to local authorities for better practice in achieving construction.
Although there can be many forms of partnering, in construction it most
often involves a promoter, his designers, and the contractor or contractors for
construction. Although the ‘partnership’ need comprise only a statement of
good intent by the parties, it can be more firmly established as a contractual
relationship. Each of the contracts entered into by the promoter then contains
a clause requiring co-operation with the other parties. Any of the usual forms
of contract can be used, dependent on the nature of the work involved and
provisions for payment. For some projects the partners may be required to
keep their books open for inspection, or cost-reimbursement contracts can be
used to provide the necessary information.
The partners and their staffs work together as a group to identify better
methods of working and overcoming potential problems and to resolve these
to the benefit of the project and the partners. Specific objectives may be set
and incentives applied to encourage co-operation of the partners, perhaps by
means of risk sharing and bonus or damages payments depending on the out-
come of the project. It is important to recognize that the partners may change
over the time scale of a project and that not all those involved in a project need
to be partners.
Partnering may apply to long term alliances where the same teams may
produce a series of works with the intent of improving the product and redu-
cing costs. This could, for example, be for such as repeated roadworks, sewer
or water main relaying, or even major works of a similar type. Alternatively
partnering can be for single projects in which case project specific objectives
may be set.

1.10 Project Management

Project Management became an ‘in vogue’ term in the mid 1990s, primarily to
emphasize the need for management to be efficient to ensure successful com-
pletion of a project. However, the term covers many possible arrangements.
Companies were set up to provide management services. A promoter
could, for instance, use a management contractor to manage the construction
of a project under either of the arrangements termed Construction Management
or Management Contracting described in Section 2.5. Alternatively where a pro-
moter requires management of both design and construction of a project, one
of the procedures described in Section 2.6 can be adopted.

7 The Government Department of the Environment, Transport & the Regions.