Collaboration forms the backbone of program alliances, with the 'pain-gain share' regime acting as an incentive to engender behaviours that foster teamwork and trusting relationships to flourish. While dialogue within and between parties in a program alliance has been identified as key to establishing collaboration and trust, there is limited understanding of how it is engendered and maintained to ensure the delivery of superior project outcomes. In filling this void, our paper aims to address the following research question: How does the value of dialogue influence effective collaboration in program alliances? A sense-making lens is adopted to garner an understanding of the value of effective dialogue in two program alliance infrastructure projects. The value and power of dialogue are examined by addressing a recurring problem that negatively impacted the performance of the alliances and their projects: rework. We show that effective dialogue mitigated rework as participants had a shared purpose. Enacting dialogue helped shape the program alliances' culture and foster an environment where people felt safe to 'speak up'. This paper's contributions are 2-fold as we: (1) unearth new value-laden principles to support dialogue in program alliances; and (2) provide empirical evidence for practitioners to help them understand the value of dialogue in delivering a program of infrastructure projects using an alliance delivery strategy.

Collaborative procurement forms such as program alliancing can create a burgeoning environment for absorptive capacity to materialize, enabling learning and rework to be mitigated. However, little is known about the learning routines and practices enabling program alliances to tackle their rework effectively. As a result, this has stymied best practices that can be used to reduce rework from being made available to other construction organizations. This paper fills this void by addressing the following research question: How does a program alliance develop its absorptive capacity to learn and mitigate its rework? We use an illustrative case study approach to draw on the practices of a transport mega-project (>AU19 billion) delivered using a series of program alliances to address our research question. We reveal how one of its program alliances utilized its absorptive capacity to assimilate and apply new knowledge to manage errors and mitigate rework. Additionally, we unearth the presence of desorptive capacity, as the alliance exploited its error knowledge and transferred it to others as part of an incentivization scheme manufactured by the client authority to stimulate learning and continuous improvement within the project. The knowledge gleaned from the program alliance case examined in this paper provides an opportunity for organizations to learn how to deal with errors and rework, which has been absent in the literature.

Collaborative procurement methods such as alliancing and its variants are becoming increasingly popular in delivering large-scale transport infrastructure projects. The systematic design of the Project Alliance Agreement (PAA) provides the basis for stimulating collaborative behaviors to be enacted, which contributes to ensuring best-for-project decision-making and outcomes are delivered. However, despite the nascent adoption of alliancing, knowledge is absent on effectively delivering transport infrastructure projects on time and within budget. Thus, this article focuses on alliances and addresses the following question: How can alliances produce reliable target outturn costs (TOC) for transport infrastructure projects? To answer this question, we draw on the experiences of senior executives involved in formulating a TOC (including the target adjustment event) in rail infrastructure projects. We find the PAA shapes and guides collaborative behaviors, enabling alliance team members to jointly consider the context and complexity of projects and thus develop realistic and reliable estimates of their TOC. The insights we obtained from the senior executives provide insights into the decision-making processes of alliances, enabling a better understanding of how large-scale rail infrastructure projects' cost and time performance can be improved.

The prevailing model for construction delivery has been based on a highly competitive tendering approach based on cost/time bids with the client (and facility operations team) taking a hands-off orientation towards direct project delivery involvement. This traditional approach is increasingly challenged by a radically different integrated and collaborative concept in which the project design (contractor and often major services subcontractors) delivery team, the facility operations team, and the project owner's representative form a united team to design and deliver the project. This integrated project delivery (IPD) form is governed by a multi-party Alliancing contractual contract, binding participating teams into a single functioning entity that is contractually assured to meet a mutually agreed fixed cost/time delivery plan. The contract uses the agreed cost/time target to incentivise participants through a gain-pain sharing mechanism based on the final project cost/time and agreed on key result performance measures. IPD performance is governed by the contract form adopted, effective collaborative, and integrative inter-personal participant behaviours, and a systemic focus on innovation and reflexivity action in response to unanticipated events affecting 'the delivery plan'. Superior performance requires participants to develop and use a specific set of knowledge, skills, attributes, and experience to support effective participant team integration and collaboration. Derek Walker and Beverley Lloyd-Walker explain how this novel project delivery form achieves this challenge.

This paper reflects on four studies of integrated project delivery in which 80 expert IPD practitioners were interviewed. Taking an institutional theory perspective with a focus on the cultural-cognitive pillar, this paper discusses how people make sense of complex situations and how they interpret what is the right course of action to take. The paper explores how their cultural-cognitive skills assists them and identifies four key elements that helps explain the development of a unified-team best-for-project mindset.

Legacy is a significant factor contributing to an infrastructure mega-project's success, but limited knowledge exists about how it is planned and enacted. Our paper aims to address the following research questions: (1) How can an infrastructure asset deliver a legacy of social value? and (2) How can social legacy ambitions be identified and operationalised? In answering these questions, we use an exploratory case study approach to make sense of the experiences of Melbourne's $19.8 billion Level Crossing Removal Project (LXRP) being delivered over 15 years using a program of alliances. We show that the LXRP's growth mindset was core to establishing its social legacy by influencing its vision, which shaped its strategy and triggered the design of its project delivery model, enabling the actions needed to generate social value to be realised. With limited examples of mega-projects demonstrating 'how' social value and legacy are created, the experiences of the LXRP offer a learning opportunity for policymakers seeking to construct transformative infrastructure assets.

Purpose Price reliability for complex and highly complicated infrastructure projects is problematic. Traditional project delivery approaches generally fail in achieving targeted end cost reliability. However, integrated project delivery (and particularly Alliancing), develop a far more reliable and robust project delivery plan and outturn time-cost targets. This paper aims to explore why this may be the case. Design/methodology/approach This case study investigated the project design, planning, cost/time estimation approach and how risk/uncertainty was dealt with. Five senior project delivery experts from an organisation that delivers multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects in Australia were interviewed. These five experts collectively had 100+ cross-disciplinary experience years delivering complex infrastructure projects. Findings Alliancing adopts a radically different approach to project design, time/cost planning and risk assessment and management to traditional project delivery approaches. Key findings explain how the project alliance agreement designs-in processes that maximises team integration and collaboration. Analysis concludes that design thinking is used to craft and shape collaborative behaviours and project governance. Additionally, including project owner and facilities operator representatives in the project team adds valuable insights, expertise and knowledge contributing to planning reliability. Research limitations/implications This study is exploratory and focussed on complex infrastructure projects so findings cannot be generalised. Practical implications We unpack Alliancing processes that develop the target outturn cost plan, comprising a holistic and realistic plan to design a project to meet expected project outcomes. This case study may serve as an exemplar for complex project delivery. Social implications This paper illustrates how Alliancing more effectively delivers best value than traditional procurement approaches through its TOC-TAE processes. Originality/value The paper contributes to the scant existing academic literature analysing these processes. Its novel contribution is explaining how Alliancing treats unexpected events that in traditional delivery forms trigger expensive and time-energy-wasting disputation. This case study may serve as an exemplar for complex project delivery.

Collaboration between academics, and between academics and industry partners, is fraught with dangers of parties not understanding what they value and what their value proposition may be. Successful engagement between research parties requires sensitivity in crafting the research questions, approach and outputs/outcomes to meet each party’s value proposition. This chapter explains, through two linked case study examples, how two senior researchers independently collaborated with an industry partner to co-generate value for all engaged parties. An example is presented of how research on one project by one of the researchers later led to unexpected positive research and published outcomes for the other researcher. Valuable business benefits were also delivered to the industry partner. We link our discussion to these two research projects as examples of what both researchers and the industry partner can achieve through a shared collaborative mindset, mutual trust and a willingness to focus on what each party valued as an outcome. This chapter illustrates how research careers may be crafted through collaboration.