How Integrated Governance Contributes to Value Generation - Insights from an IPD Case Study

Past research has found many drawbacks in the conventional approaches to managing projects. Among the criticisms is the traditional understanding of value generation primarily focused on product creation, while the industry struggles to meet the expectations of different groups of stakeholders about the benefits that these projects are supposed to generate. In the pursuit of projects as means to achieve agreed goals and the fulfilment of a purpose, alternative approaches have been suggested. Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) is structured to deliver greater value from projects by aligning stakeholder expectations through integrated governance. This allows the major players to develop a much higher level of common understanding of the project, its purpose, and work towards value generation collaboratively. A case study was carried out in an IPD project to understand how integrated governance affects value generation. The findings suggest that IPD enables an environment in which value can be co-created, as it shifts the customer versus supplier relationship into a customer plus supplier relationship. Customer expectations and supplier assumptions are challenged in a dynamic and collaborative environment. While this can represent great improvement in generating value from construction projects, the increased managerial challenges of such interactions should also be noted. To establish and maintain focus in such environments is more challenging and this paper suggests that more research should be carried out on the role of techniques and tools in supporting people to focus on what is important.