Key features of a project alliance and their impact on the success of an apartment renovation: a case study

ABSTRACT

With a view to becoming more efficient and cost-effective, the construction sector has been focusing more and more on developing new delivery and collaborative procurement procedures, such as project alliances. Until now, project alliances have focused mostly on large-scale road, rail and water infrastructure projects. Despite the positive results achieved in these projects, the building and real estate sector has been rather reluctant to use this delivery method. The objective of this study was to find out whether it makes sense to use project alliancing in more everyday projects. The chosen case study is a renovation construction project in Finland that was contracted using the project alliance approach. In order to have a comprehensive understanding of the issues involved, a literature review was conducted and case project-specific documentation analysed. Subsequently, several interviews were conducted with project participants, paying particular attention to the experiences and feedback obtained from developer, contractor and designer sides. In terms of the project participants’ perspectives, the alliance was unanimously seen as an asset which contributed to high levels of collaboration between participants and made it possible to achieve positive results.

KEYWORDS:

• Project alliance
• relational contracting
• project delivery systems
• renovation
• apartment building
• case study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.