Partnering

Partnering is a form of collaboration management concept within the construction industry, in which the client, engineer, architecture and entrepreneur enter into a partnership based on dialogue, trust and shared responsibility. Partnering was established in the early 1980s in USA where a full partnership relation between the oil company Shell and the engineering firms Parson & SIP was established and has recently gained ground in the construction industry, as a well-known collaboration between key project stakeholders.

Partnering is part of the development in the construction industry, which is trying to catch up with the manufacturing industry by changing the low productivity development. In partnering, a main focus is for the participants to share the same values and thereby obtain a better starting point for the construction processes and thus a better result, which will be a success for all partners.

History

The basic principle of partnering was already present in the 1920s in Britain, a partnering relationship between Bevis-Marks & Spencer, but the term partnering is considered established in the beginning of the 1980s in the United States of America.

The litigation in the construction industry exploded in the early 1980s in USA, so the industry started to work with some basic management principles to deal with the organizational conflicts and the first full partnering relationship was established between the oil company Shell and the engineering firms Parson & SIP. However, the partnering model as it is known today was first developed and introduced by the US Corps of Army Engineers in the late 1980s, as a concept of the Japanese management tool Total Quality Management (TQM). The purpose of the new founded concept was to improve productivity and efficiency in the construction industry. The first projects showed a clear improvement of the efficiency throughout the entire construction process and even reduced the costs.

In the 1990s, the English government started to do some new initiatives in the construction sector to reduce the rising cost development, including conflict management. The results of partnering has been recognized all over the world the recent years and the experience shows that the construction projects often can be built faster and cheaper with a better final result.

The Danish government has because of the results of partnering ordered the governmental clients to carry out a systematic assessment prior of any construction project, to evaluate whether partnering it beneficial in the specific case or not.

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