Relationship between Early Contractor Involvement and Financial Performance in the Rebuilding of Infrastructure in Christchurch, New Zealand

Abstract

Alliance contracting is a partnering project or program delivery method in which all parties work collaboratively to share risks. The Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) alliance has been set up to manage the high risk of the unknown scopes of work associated with disaster recovery projects after the 2011 earthquakes in Christ-church, New Zealand. SCIRT uses early contractor involvement (ECI) as a key measure of risk mitigation and to offer value for money. ECI provides constructability input during the design process to ensure that any issues and construction risks are identified early and taken into consideration. Because there has been considerable pressure to start the rebuilding, not all SCIRT projects have had the benefit of ECI. With the objective of quantifying the positive effect that ECI has on financial outcomes, 288 projects that were in construction or had been finished by the end of February 2014 were compared. The comparison was based on whether ECI had been used both during the design phase of a project and in the cost estimation of the project. The results clearly showed that across the alliance program there was significant improvement in cost performance and cost accuracy of reconstruction projects that received early contractor input.