COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF NEW ZEALAND 1 ALLIANCE CONTRACTING AND US PROJECT DELIVERY MODELS

摘要

After the Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand, a massive reconstruction program commenced. The total damage to commercial and infrastructure assets had been estimated at approximately NZ$20 billion. A new project delivery model has been developed to cope with the difficulties of disaster rebuild programs like unknown scope, political pressures, and intense public scrutiny. The Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure rebuild Team (SCIRT) is a unique development of the ‘pure’ alliance commercial model in that it aligns commercial drivers with high performance objectives to deliver mutually agreed outcomes. The SCIRT collaborative alliance has overlain convention with competitive tension without upsetting the fundamental outcome-focus drivers. The overall effect is a positive impact of continually giving incentive to raise performance of delivery teams, both as separate entities and in shared support with the resulting benefit to client organisations. In the US, a potential framework for implementing alliance-style contracts has already been successfully used to procure disaster recovery construction projects on a very large scale using multiple award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts. The paper conducts a comparative analysis of the two approaches and finds that the level of collaboration in the US IDIQ model is not nearly as comprehensive as in the NZ alliance contracts. It also concludes that the major barrier to implementing alliance contracts in the US is development of an approach to ‘pain-gain’ sharing that is compatible with both US federal and state procurement statutes.