Collaborative Contracting in Progressive Design-Build Delivery

Public procurement and contracting creates the atmosphere for how projects are delivered. It’s often marred by unclear documents, unnecessary extensions, difficult contract negotiations, and limits collaboration between the owner and contractor, creating adversaries rather than partners. Bad processes lead to decreased opportunities for success. Austin Transit Partnership is a local government corporation established to plan, design, construct and implement Austin's first light rail system. For this purpose, we have been deliberate in how we engage the industry and developed a new model for collaborative contracting that has never been done in the United States and aided us in the selection of a delivery parter and two progressive design-build contracts for this multi-billion-dollar project. Our collaborative contracting model is designed to mitigate the barriers to project success (limited experience, bad plans/approaches/schedules/ and wrong personalities). It has included collaborative behavioral assessments – a first for the United States – and an iterative approach to resolving proposal and contract conflicts early. The results included increased competition, shortened procurement timelines, limited proposer questions, and negotiation that are weeks long rather than months. It has centered the process on creating partners that are mutually committed a defined goal/plan for project success. We’d like to share our process.