Towards strengthening the coordination by clients in multidisciplinary projects with multiple contractors

Abstract

The current market forces of infrastructural projects in the Dutch construction sector necessitate public clients to divide a large-scale multidisciplinary project into multiple contracts. This causes diverse contractors to have to work simultaneously. Interfaces arise between the contracts, which require a deeper collaboration to align all activities. Coordination becomes a very important factor in such projects. Current attempts to create better coordination focus mainly on clients' contractual and organizational measures. This research aims to map the importance of the human aspect within coordination and help a client organize itself to create a better coordination process. This is done by looking at the contractual and organizational instruments that stimulate coordination. Hereby, the organizational measures are divided into relational, personal, and governance aspects.

Through a literature review, the steering mechanisms for good coordination within the contractual, relational, personal, and governance contexts were established. A case study provided the issues of coordination in practice and laid down the basis of possible instruments to help a public client with the coordination process. The main takeaways were the misinterpretation and misalignment of the specifications of agreements, choosing the wrong coordinator, the lack of attention to relations, and the unclear governance from the client’s side. After this, a preliminary framework of the coordination process was reviewed through expert sessions. Together, this created the basis for the final framework of this thesis.
The key findings of this research were the need to facilitate coordination and collaboration during the pre-execution through requirements in the contracts and a start-up period with the involved clients and the co-contractors. During the execution phase key findings were the need to facilitate coordination and collaboration by the attention to the human aspect and its process, besides aiming for the best project result. This research contributed to the current literature by showing how the current coordination processes of a public client within the Dutch construction sector lack attention to the human side during projects.