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Essay about The Emerging Prevelence of Early Contractor Involvement

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Introduction Conventional Civil and Building projects in the construction industry use a number of traditional, popular and familiar forms of contracts. These have a good track record in meeting time, cost and quality requirements for straightforward projects; however, they are unlikely to meet the timeframes and budget constraints expected by Governments when undertaking complex and high risk projects were the scope of the work is not yet defined (Ma & Xin). Insufficient or poor quality design documentation is often the cause for construction overruns and cost blowouts, creating claims for variations and omissions. (Pullen) All too often, the building site becomes a hostile environment to do business. This is in no small way, due to the …show more content…

(Smith, 1995, as cited in Mosey) Traditional contracts struggle to deliver these requirements especially for complex and high risk projects. Consequently, the allocation of risk can be complicated and costly if its not assigned correctly. A shared risk mechanism might be more appropriate in this case. However this can only work when all the parties are aware of the implications involved. This is precisely why the traditional construction only or D&C contracts don’t work for these projects, because they exclude the main contractor’s influences from the early design and project planning stage. The builder is not introduced until after the design is finalised and tenders are being sought (Mosey, 2009). The contractor’s attempts to assess the risk involved and prices accordingly are inhibited. Insufficient time or information usually results in additional cost to cover potential risk. This is just one reason ECI,s were developed. Also the adversarial environment in traditional contracts stifles innovation and communications, proving to be detrimental to the professional relationships, ultimately affecting the clients objectives (Pullen) Creating a team A famous industrialist once said, “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress and working together

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