PhD Final Thesis April 2013.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

Appendices to Thesis Keith Gale 2013and I think procurement can help that, err again through being open, your form ofcontract can help to ensure that projects are right first time. Again, NEC through thepartnering ethos and very much through ethos of having open communication, earlynotification of issues, as opposed to say an ICE service where you could have hada… ‘this is ambiguous.. we’ll put it in the cheapest way because that’s the way we’regoing to make money out of it and the client clarifies this and we might make a bit ofmoney and that’s fine. But the project won’t be right first time.Q12 In your opinion, which procurement method encourages longer termrelationships between parties to a construction project? Why do you think this is?Ummm, I think frameworks definitely do encourage long term relationships betweenparties because of that ability to build relationships between organisations through aseries of projects at multiple times. I think also the framework has the added benefitthat your suppliers will talk to each other in an as open way as they’ll ever talk toeach other, and that will help the strength of your team behind it. I’ve seen situationswhere one supplier has issues with certain elements of the client’s staff and otherdon’t. I think its quite a good yardstick for the organisation to be able to say.. “Ok,these two people don’t seem to be getting on. Why is that? Is it a resolvable issue oris it a personality problem?” And I think this is kind of the same with yourframework. You can kind of look at the performance mechanisms involved, you canlook at the KPI scores, the client satisfaction scores, and you can see where theremight be relationship issues. You can say.. “well maybe we’re not performing aswell as an organisation because these people seem quite disgruntled about theseaspects of our work”, which has to be a positive thing to draw out of it. You know,saying “Ok, what can we do better”. And again, same for suppliers, you know, canyou get them to pull there socks up and perform in a better way than they would havedone on a traditional project? Because again, traditional projects, it’s a singleprocurement, you may or may not work for them again. It’s that long termrelationship that you can build. Especially when you can use things like frameworkforum meetings – strategy boards, getting everyone in a room together and talkingthrough issues in a generic way really - If anyone feels threatened about theircommercial sensitivity, and I think that’s a positive thing.390