Value management workshops and partnering conundrums

The pressure for reform bearing upon the construction industry has become overwhelming and some fundamental changes in the way that construction projects are procured and managed are taking place. The industry and its clients and commentators, as well as those engaged in research, need a means of analysing the changes being brought about within the industry. This paper reviews the current approaches to describing and analysing the procurement and management systems within construction. Some approaches are found to have merits in relation to the analysis of specific aspects of procurement or management (for example, critical path analysis effectively demonstrates the interdependence associated with individual project decisions). None of the existing approaches alone, however, provide a rigorous, quantitative analysis of construction procurement and management systems within the context of individual construction project coalitions. This paper concludes that social network analysis, although linked to a large body of quite complex theory, provides a quantitative and comparative methodology for analysing a number of characteristics within both traditional and new procurement approaches. The main issues are appropriateness of level of analysis, uniformity and non-hierarchical approach to visualisation, comparability across differing governance systems, ability to reflect a non-linear, complex, iterative and interactive process, and the growing importance of non-dyadic relationships. This paper reports on research to investigate the effectiveness of value management workshop techniques in setting up and maintaining partnering agreements throughout the course of a project. The research focuses on a case study involving a housing association project to build approximately 200 houses on a brownfield site in Glasgow. All thirteen partners comprising six legal entities were asked by the housing association to become involved in the project partnering agreement. The case study involved a series of value management workshops conducted from November 2001 to March 2002 at different intervention points or 'opportunities' in the project life cycle (Kelly and Male et al., 1993) summarised as the pre-brief workshop (partnering agreement), the briefing workshop and the concept design workshop. The research methodology comprised of literature review, action research in the form of value management workshops and interview questionnaires conducted prior to and following the workshops. The paper concludes that value management is an effective management tool to set up and maintain a partnership.