Coaching the team towards high-performance: Facilitation for infrastructure delivery

Engendering teamwork, trust and cooperation are essential for high performance, innovation and problem-solving. This can be challenging in transactional traditional design-bid-build with fixed-price contract environments where the commercial drivers of clients and contractors on a collision course. The upshot is adversarial relationships, variation-seeking behaviour, cost overruns and expensive change orders. Team coaching, using a Project Facilitation Model is presented here for client-contractor relationship management to enable optimum team performance based on the principles of relational contracting. The model was applied on a water infrastructure project that involved four principal contractors working on different packages based on traditional lump-sum contracts. Using a case-study approach and evidence from 27 semi-structured interviews, the study explores the effectiveness of project facilitation, when it can be implemented and its limitations. The results indicate that facilitation may be able to support a less adversarial and more collaborative environment than that experienced on classic traditional lump-sum contract frameworks. Key outcomes of the model include a platform for transparent communications, joint problem-solving and engendering a level of psychological safety among the team. The innovation of this research is that relationship-based principles have been integrated into the delivery of a traditional lump-sum contract. However, further explication and testing of the model on different projects and teams is necessary to explore its efficacy and possible limitations.