Improving Project Preparation

Building Client Capabilities

Understandably, clients tend to under-invest in project preparation during the initiation phase as they seek to minimise design, development and feasibility study costs. However, because many projects are put to tender with incomplete documentation and before their cost has been estimated accurately, tenderers have to add a significant risk premium to their bids. Project costs cannot be accurately estimated without detailed design and specifications, and high cost bids for a project allow the later diversion of funds. On the other hand, incomplete design can lead to estimates below project costs, with consequent claims and disputes obscuring the eventual recipients of funds. Contractors’ claims for reimbursement can lead to significant cost increases, and an unscrupulous contractor will also cheat on materials, compromise on quality, and deliver below the specification, resulting in poor quality assets with high maintenance costs.

Therefore, the first reason clients should invest in the development of some internal PM capabilities is because the quality of design and documentation before tendering reduces contractor risk and thus total project cost. Whether these documents are being prepared internally or externally, this task is one of design management. If the interaction between designers, consultants and contractors is managed by the client project team, they take responsibility for the project’s overall design and development at the earliest stages. Separating the design stage from tendering will also improve opportunities for consultation.

The second reason clients should invest in the development of internal capabilities is because they are, in reality, holding the eventual risk of their projects when they complete and become operational. The ability to manage that risk with their own client team on major projects, responsible for the process of project shaping and front-end definition, is an opportunity to add a great deal of value for the client. Even when consultants and contractors work to the best of their abilities, their firms have separate interests from the client.

The key factor is the extent of the specifications. On some major projects there may be a limit to how much design can be completed upfront, as this develops over time and the project details are refined and defined. It is unreasonable to expect a complex project to be fully specified at tender, and in most cases this would not be possible. It may also be advantageous to look for innovative ideas or design options, so for these projects an incremental approach would be followed to allow contractors and suppliers the opportunity for input during the development of the design. This also has the advantage of reducing uncertainty from poor tender documentation, thus lowering risk and cost for tenderers.

The client PM and project team should be responsible for overseeing the design and documentation of the project, ensuring the most appropriate construction options are chosen. Despite the proliferation of contracts used in the building and construction industry most major projects are delivered using either the traditional design-bid-build or Design and Build (D&B) and Design and Construct (D&C) contracts. The trend has been toward D&B and D&C contracts for major projects, and these account for a larger share of work done than number of projects. There is some support for design and construct procurement of buildings and social infrastructure from school PPPs in Australia and hospital PFIs in the UK. This may be due to the buildability issues found in complex buildings with many services, like hospitals, or the emphasis on maintenance costs with schools. However,  the problems found in D&C projects of design changes by the client and conflict of interest between design team members and the contractor are common.

Nevertheless, Ed Merrow argues for traditional construction procurement for the types of projects in his database. This is when consultants are appointed to manage the design, and a competitive tender is held for one or more contractors to execute the works on site against a complete design. Using evidence from the 11,000 private sector resource, industrial and engineering projects in his database, Merrow believes the best form of project delivery is what he calls ‘mixed’, with engineering design contractors hired on a reimbursable contract, and construction contractors hired on a separate fixed price contract. The evidence from the database suggests this is the most effective form of project organization, and represents traditional procurement with consultants appointed to do the design, and a competitive tender run for one or more contractors based on the finished design.

The approach advocated here combines elements of both the D&C and traditional procurement strategies. By engaging the PM and project team early, before detailed design work commences, the integration of design development with construction options retains the advantage of a D&C contract, as the PM manages the consultants as they develop the design solutions. However, the loss of control and the premium that is paid for management of a D&C contract is avoided.

Three Approaches to Projects

Networks, markets and psychology

Over the last decade a wide range of firms, organisations and industries have done or are in the process of restructuring themselves into some form of project-based production, following the lead of industries like construction, defence contracting, consulting and software that have traditionally used this form of organisation. At the same time the idea of what constitutes a project, using distinctions such as hard/soft, standardised/complex, mega/other and so on, has greatly expanded.

If project based production makes an important contribution to economic output that is a reason to study it, applying the methods and tools available. Given their multifaceted nature, it is obvious that ideas from many different fields of inquiry can be usefully applied to a range of issues found in projects and their characteristics. From economics there are interesting, relevant ideas that have come out of research across a diverse range of topics, including organisational and regulatory economics, property rights and contracts, governance and the principle-agent problem.

One way of harnessing this diversity is to use some of the characteristics of projects as a mechanism to group ideas together. The method used here is based on three broad approaches to understanding projects: projects as networks; projects as markets; and the psychology of projects:

1. Projects as networks covers fields including incomplete contracts and procurement, collusion and corruption, supply chains and sub-contracting, lean production, integrated teams and temporary organisations.
2. There is both a market for projects, and a project as a temporary market. Topics in this area include market characteristics and structure, market power and monopsony, auctions, bidding and information, Williamson’s fundamental transformation and asset specificity, and the ratchet effect in contracting and tendering.
3. The psychology of projects is based on recent developments in behavioural and experimental economics, in turn largely based on Kahnemann and Tversky’s work. Optimism bias, bounded rationality, incentives and Flyvberg’s delusion and deception view are examples. Underpinning these are the principal-agent problem, moral hazard and information asymmetry.

The fields ideas can be drawn from, that are outside the general project management literature, include management and organisation studies, psychology and behavioural economics, network analysis, lean production, legal and institutional research, and transaction cost economics. Economic theory can be applied to a range of issues found in the procurement and contracting of projects. Thus topics such as competitive and oligopolistic markets, auction theory, game theory and buyer and supplier power are relevant.

Another example is the economics of contracts. This field includes the role of incomplete contracts in self-enforcing relationships, the design of contracts, economic reasoning and the framing of contract law, and the contract as economic trade. It overlaps transaction cost economics and its application to property rights, agency theory, moral hazard and incentives. Other related topics are norms and the theory of the firm, allocating decision rights under liquidity constraints, authority and flexibility in contracts, and theories of contract regulation.

Many of these topics are also found in New Institutional Economics and work on the econometrics of contracts and markets. Because projects can be seen as a collection of contracts, written and unwritten, all this is clearly relevant. Another is the role of legal and regulatory structures in institutional economics, which emphasises the importance of a stable and predictable environment for entrepreneurs and businesses, here taken to be the clients and contractors involved in the business of delivering projects.

Where the study of how economic activity is organized fits is a grey area. It exists somewhere between micro and macroeconomics, and is primarily interested in imperfectly competitive markets, like those found in professional services. In these sorts of markets reputation, relationships, regulation and risk are major factors, all of which have been extensively studied.

What the diversity of ideas collected here provides is, in many ways, the overall context and framing of a project. In the same way as a business plan starts with a scan of the environment and a SWOT analysis, a project could have a context scan of the network, market and behavioural aspects. That’s not to say these factors are not all part of professional project planning. Obviously they are. Rather, the economic approach shifts the focus to questions about how best to design and structure a project from the point of view of organising production and fulfilling a social or economic role. It’s a functional approach that has a limited amount to say about managing production or specific PM decisions.

The Ratchet Effect in Construction

An Economic Perspective on Construction Procurement 

The incentive problem in short-term contracting is the main issue addressed here. This problem in construction has often been seen from the perspective of the principal-agent problem, where the focus is on motivating the agent and monitoring outcomes. By taking the incentive problem as the focus of the discussion the emphasis shifts away from the relationship between the principal and the agent, which is well understood, to the effort a contractor will make to minimise costs or improve performance. This aspect of principal-agent relations has been a major theme in labour economics, the economics of regulation and elsewhere.

The process of procurement has a number of side effects. While the intention is to purchase, the method determines outcomes. For building and construction projects the method generally used is a form of auction, typically a common-values low bid auction, where bidder costs are the same or similar and the project is awarded to the lowest bidder. This process has all the characteristics of economic models of one period contracts in short-term contracting under information asymmetry. It is also the case that the major public and private sector clients are repeat clients as they regularly bring projects to the market, and this is equivalent to the two periods in models of regulation

Here some of the insights into the behaviour of suppliers or contractors from the economics of regulation is applied to construction contracting. The approach is interesting because it is now generally accepted that procurement can be treated as a subset of regulation, following the model developed by Laffont and Tirole, which treats regulation as a principal-agent problem, with the government as regulator the principal, and the regulated firm (in fact its manager) as the agent. The regulator can observe realized production costs, but not how much effort the firm puts into cost-reduction (a post-contractual hidden effort problem). Importantly, the firm knows more about cost-reducing technology than the regulator (a pre-contractual hidden information problem).

In their model there are two types of firms: low effort firms will not try very hard to reduce their production costs, while high effort firms will be very responsive to cost reduction incentives. Therefore the problem is modeled as one of information asymmetry, with the focus on discovering the manager’s type, whether they are a high-effort Type 1 or a low-effort Type 2.

The first type responds to contractual incentives while the second does not, so the principal can use incentives to induce more information revelation from the agent, i.e. to get the agent to disclose whether they are a Type 1 or Type 2 manager, and the regulator can make transfers to the firm. Such transfers are clearly necessary in the case of procurement, where the principal/client pays the firm/contractor for work performed under a contract to supply goods and/or services.

In this context what is called the commitment problem arises, because the optimum outcome possible in the first period, or round of tenders, cannot be repeated twice. The problem turns on the existence of asymmetric information. In each of the two periods the government/regulator wants to procure a public good, and if they could credibly commit to a long-run (two-period) contract the optimal two period outcome would be the same as the one-period optimum twice. They call this the perfect commitment outcome. The perfect commitment outcome requires credible commitment to a long-run contract.

If the regulator cannot make credible long-run commitments, long-run contracts are ruled out. With the regulator unable to write a long-run contract with the regulated firm, it has instead to govern the relationship by a sequence of short-run (one-period) contracts.

This gives rise to what is known as the ratchet effect, an outcome of the regulated firm’s unwillingness to reveal whether it is a Type 1 or Type 2 firm in the first period, because that would mean the regulator no longer faces asymmetric information, and allow the regulator to take any gains by the firm from, for example, cost reductions that might be the result of the firm’s efforts or use of new technology.

Laffont and Tirole proved that after period 1 the regulator will in general not know the firm’s true type. Intuitively, the ratchet effect implies that information unfolds slowly, as the manager tries to protect his information rents by not revealing his true type. Thus the ratchet effect happens when an agent works hard and shows a good result, but the principal then may demand an even better result in the future. Anticipating this, the rational agent has little incentive to work hard in the first place, and this tendency for performance standards to increase after a period of good performance is called the ratchet effect.

Early formal models of ratchet effects emerged in the 1980s, and ratchet effects were predicted in specific informational and contractual environments where hidden action and hidden information must be present, and the parties must be in a repeated relationship yielding some quasi-rents to both where binding multi-period agreements are not feasible.

How does this apply to building and construction?

Is it likely that construction contractors respond to clients’ requests for bids by attempting to preserve hidden information? Is it possible they will not want to reveal themselves as a Type 1 cost-minimising firm? There seems to be three reasons.

Firstly, it reduces competition to a straightforward shootout on price, but because all tenderers have similar costs this is just a decision on margin, based on current and expected workload. Therefore the competition in any given tender is likely to be driven as much by contractors’ workload considerations as their estimated cost of the project. Even without cartel arrangements this is a form of managed competition, whereby the tenderers will not deviate too far from the client’s expected cost for the project, which will also be similar to industry estimates, thus avoiding revelation of a significant cost advantage on one project that might jeopardise margins on future projects.

Secondly, it allows for gradual improvements in productivity and efficiency, which are neither disruptive nor expensive to contractors, but will deliver a windfall gain to the contractor if a project comes in well under budget or schedule, which may be the result of some innovation by the contractor. This gain will, of course, be hidden from the client and from competitors as much as possible.

This suggests that there might be many cost reducing innovations available to contractors at any time, but the pressure to apply them will be muted by market conditions and a contractor’s appreciation of competitors’ likelihood of using them. Innovation is used here as a broad term that covers any and all product and process developments that can reduce final construction costs. There are costs and risks associated with innovation, so it is in the interests of all bidders to minimise these costs to themselves.

Thirdly, the winning bidder will always have the option of revealing themselves to be a Type 1 firm, if for some reason they want to. There will usually be some innovation available that will reduce project costs, but will be costly (i.e. require upfront investment) to the contractor. Thus the success of many major contractors in winning repeat work through negotiation rather than tendering is explained. By pushing the innovation boundary to reduce costs on the period 1 project the contractor gets the period two project without tendering costs at the new level of the client’s price expectation. (This does not exclude more traditional methods of cost reduction such as cash farming or subcontractor oppression of course).

The general argument made here is that the ratchet effect in the procurement process used in building and construction (typically auctions of single projects) will limit cost reductions from productivity and efficiency gains by contractors and subcontractors. This is an outcome of the unwillingness of bidders to reveal their hidden knowledge to clients, who will then expect future performance at the improved level. This is because clients typically only offer a single project at a time, or sometimes a bundle of projects, instead of sequences of projects. Thus short term contracting under information asymmetry.