Building trust and managing risk between the client, consultant, and contractor in traditional and relational construction projects

This research examines the relationships between the tripartite of Client, Consultant Engineer, and the Contractor during construction project implementation. It examines contract behaviour and how collaborative practices build inter-organisation Trust in construction contracts. Five projects were selected for the study. Three were trust-based Public Private Partnership contracts, while two were Traditional standard contracts. The initial research question was: How do inter-organisational Trust relationships affect construction project management with respect to Cost, Time and Quality? This qualitative research identified the threefold nature of Trust as Contractual Trust, Competence Trust, and Goodwill Trust. By analysing and clustering of respondent themes, two overarching concept themes emerged on how to build Trust between the Client, the Consultant, and the Contractor. The first theme was on financial matters, which included Working Capital Advance payment and Materials pre-purchase schemes. Addressing this theme created inter-party collaboration and Trust which positively affected project Cost, Program and Quality. The second theme was on creation of tripartite Trust by aligning Contractor and Consultant skills, capacity, and experience. The evidence indicated that it was essential to take advantage of any history of previous professional acquaintance and to frequently work together. It emerged that if collaborative action was taken on the basis of the above two themes, Trust could be built and used for more equitable construction project risk sharing. The actionable knowledge was that the numerous indemnity clauses, Working Capital Advance guarantees and excessive experience requirement of Site staff are all project constraints which must be removed. Clients were using indemnity Clauses to shirk away from Risk and responsibility. Contract start dates and liquidated delay damages must be coordinated with the payment date for the Advance in the standard Traditional Contracts. In some cases, time overruns arose because Contract signatures and start dates were preceding the Advance payment date by three months. The Contractor was failing to commence actual construction work due to delays in the release of the Advance payment. The study furthermore found that trust, collaboration and risk sharing is essential to facilitate short-term transactions in Traditional standard contracts. There was evidence that in order to get repeat work the Contractor was punitively depending on the Client?s goodwill and benevolence. A paradigm shift based on implementing recommended action on the two themes of financial issues and technical capacity building could reduce this dependency or eliminate it altogether. The research revealed that as of 2017 there were less than five Public Private Partnership (PPP) contracts implemented in Zimbabwe and Malawi. This number of PPP projects was insignificant given the gaping need in these countries to construct public user infrastructure such as roads, electricity generation, ICT, water, and sanitation. The study also synthesized the problem of the massive brain-drain and the fragility of the economies of these two countries which has resulted in the lack of appropriately skilled and experienced construction project site staff. The study proposed to alleviate this skills shortage with the formation of a Retired Engineers and Allied Professional?s Organization. No such organizations exist in these two countries.