The exponential growth of alliances over the past decade has led to an increase in historical, sociological and psychological research into collaborative modes of work. The key to success with alliance projects is effective collaboration between the owner organisations, designers and builders of infrastructure projects. It’s a situation that has led to greater interest in how individuals behave and in ways to transform groups into high performance teams.

Project alliancing involves both “hard” (technical, financial, etc.) and “soft” (human) challenges. While business is well-used to measuring the former, there has been a lack of suitable tools to measure, diagnose and improve the “softer” issues of relationship building and maintenance at all levels of an alliance. Psychologists are essential to repairing this shortcoming.

Alliances require “the right psychological foundation” and a different “psychological bargain” compared to more traditional forms of contracting. Furthermore, psychologists are trained in measurement of human attributes.
On this basis, a new model for measurement of “soft” metrics, the Alliance Psychological Contract (APC), was initially developed to a rudimentary stage by Beames (2007) , and subsequently refined through empirical research involving Australia-wide interviews with 24 alliance experts, who have 600 years of combined experience.

The development and application of the APC model, which is part of a PhD investigating alliance relationships and performance outcomes, can help build more committed and innovative teams, and create faster, smoother and extraordinary outcomes that transcend business as usual.

About your Author: Sebastian Salicru, Director, Alliance Benchmarking Institute

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