Megaproject partnerships powering better delivery

One of my most formative career experiences was supporting the London 2012 Olympics program as part of the team that served as the delivery partners to the Olympic Delivery Authority.

More than a decade since, that program remains the industry benchmark for excellent delivery, completed early and under budget, while elevating standards of safety, sustainability and socioeconomic value. It sparked a legacy that continues today – generating ongoing investments and returns in community development, urban renewal and resilience. 

Since then, we’ve led successful megaprojects delivered via partnerships around the world, and while each is tailored to unique program characteristics, all of them demonstrate the power of collaboration to consistently enhance speed, certainty and value delivered. 

Now, as capital projects grow in scale and complexity, we’re seeing increased interest in partnership models to bring them to fruition – especially delivery partnership, progressive design-build, integrated program delivery, alliances, and public-private partnership. 

Proof in practice 

In our report, The Future of Major Program Delivery, we compiled global data on 5,000+ mega programs to examine common challenges and opportunities and offer recommendations on measures organizations can implement to deliver capital programs at pace and scale. 

With partnership at the heart of the most successful programs comes a sobering truth that we must address as an industry: The population of professionals who possess the experience and multidisciplinary skills needed to successfully lead megaprojects, let alone collaborative delivery, remains limited. Although we talk a lot about collaboration in the industry, we need to bridge a canyon-sized experience gap between the concept and practice. Multibillion-dollar megaprojects are inherently complex, involving numerous partners, stakeholders, and political interests, as well as various contracts and funding conditions. The stakes are simply too high for learn-as-you-go leadership. 

Even the concept of collaboration is misunderstood. Some believe it’s about getting everyone to “play nice”. Others dismiss collaborative delivery as a souped-up form of construction- or program management.  

In our experience, collaborative delivery is quite different from CM or PM, which are management processes applied in sequence. Collaborative delivery is not a management process, and it’s not sequential. It’s an organizational culture, built with the intention of inspiring high performance in concert with all partners and parties working together as one team. 

While PM and CM typically maintain some degree of separation between teams and the discrete phases, packages and contracts they’re expected to deliver, we look to break down such silos in partnership models. We instead knit them together as one big, dynamic picture to enable active and agile management of ever-changing issues, interfaces and interdependencies throughout the life of the program. 

Leveraging partnership for value creation

From a management perspective, a well-run partnership effectively trades hierarchical command and control for a flatter, leaner, “all-in” team culture, prioritizing shared accountability. It’s a mindset shift that requires multidisciplinary leadership skills beyond management and engineering. Leaders also most possess cross-functional business acumen and fluency in behavioral and social dynamics to shape the culture. Then, as project players become a cohesive team working with common purpose, it results in reduced frictions, increased agility and quicker decision making because team members know and trust one another to do their part. 

Early integration plays a key role in fostering the right  team culture to propel delivery. This is why we recommend starting earlier and going slow at the start to enable faster delivery. We’ve found that taking time to establish and socialize governance and build an integrated management framework inclusive of all parties is worthwhile because it sets the stage for streamlined execution.  

Throughout the course of delivery, we impart practical experience to the clients and partners involved, formally investing development that initially builds trust and commitment,  then pays off in project performance, and ultimately pays forward by preparing them to deliver future programs after our work is done. This also serves to bridge the experience gap in our industry. 

As the partnership shifts into high gear, demonstrating certainty of delivery on-track, it pays further dividends: It bolsters the confidence of program funders and community stakeholders. Moreover, assured delivery attracts additional investments like transit-oriented development and catalyzes business growth to benefit the tax base and generate socioeconomic value for the greater community. 

Now, at a time of growing reliance on partnerships to bring capital programs to fruition, the question remains: What’s the secret to success? We address it with insights, recommendations and case studies in our report. 

While there’s no singular solution that guarantees successful delivery, history, as well as our own experience, point to partnership and the one lesson no project leader can afford to miss. Culture – more than any strategy, contracting method, or operating plan – ultimately determines whether a program succeeds or stalls.