International Construction Law Review
HOW SUITE IT IS TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU: THE 2016 CFI IPD MODELS
MARKO MISKO1
Partner, Clayton Utz
ABSTRACT
The Australian Department of Defence’s Capital Facilities and Infrastructure Branch (“CFI”) has had its owner-focused suite of infrastructure delivery models for 25 years (since 1992). Over that time, the suite has developed organically, to ensure that it makes the most of market innovation and responds to industry developments. The most recent exciting push has been to embrace a more meaningfully integrated approach to project delivery (i.e., Integrated Project Delivery “IPD”). This builds on the many positive features of the managing contractor model (Defence’s first collaborative delivery model, introduced in 1992), but goes much further – as such it represents a significant shift in Australian government infrastructure procurement. This paper focuses on the key objectives of (and innovations under) IPD, and the lessons learned to date (as of January 2017), across 6 distinct pilot projects implemented nationally
since 2015.
I. INTRODUCTION
CFI’s new IPD suite is all about creating conflict. That’s right, conflict. And it does this through integration. The IPD suite takes all the relevant project stakeholders and creates a single integrated project team (“IPT”) at the outset of the project. The fundamental idea of the IPT is to generate conflict, and then provide for its positive resolution, on a best-for-project basis. This is consistent with positive conflict theory, which is encapsulated in Professor Paula Gerber’s and Brennan Ong’s wonderful text Best Practice in Construction Disputes,2 as follows:
“Task conflict, also referred to as cognitive conflict, relates to disagreements about the content and nature of a particular task. It arises due to differing viewpoints, opinions and ideas held between individuals or groups about how to perform a particular task. Task conflict therefore abounds in any construction project …
1 Marko Misko, Partner, Clayton Utz (mmisko@claytonutz.com).
The author has been part of the team within CFI – headed by Bob Baird AM (Executive Director Program Assurance) and Jolanta Skawinski (Deputy Director, Program Assurance).
2 Paula Gerber and Brennan Ong, Best Practice in Construction Disputes (Sydney, 2013), 39–40.
Pt 4] The 2016 CFI IPD Models
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