Are We Prepared for When Projects Go Wrong?

• Having the right people in place is a critical success factor on high-value and complex projects
• The best procurement strategies will look beyond the contractor’s competence and cost
• We also factor in their skill at collaboration and the way they behave
  

MTR knows it well and they engaged JCP in 2023 to perform the Collaborative Behavioral Assessment (CBA) of their tenderers for the Northern Link Project. From our engagement discussion with MTR, one of their key expectations on Supply Chain would be around accountability and ownership of design and construction within a “collaborative team environment”.

The Rationales for Collaborative Behavioural Assessment of Suppliers are as follows:

• To assess the willingness and ability of the tenderer to work collaboratively
• To signal the client’s expectations and commitment to work collaboratively
• Early engagement with the tenderer at the earliest moment – sets the scene
• Has the effect of the tenderer allocating their ‘more collaborative’ staff
  

We worked seamlessly with MTR’s Project Team in 2023 to formulate and execute the following plan, conducted focus groups to develop and refine the critical bahaviours for CBA, identified what good and poor behaviours would look like, assigned weighting against the criteria, observed at their technical meetings with tenderers and designed assessment workshops and off-site activities that simulated project scenarios.

The outcomes were very satisfactory, and a tenderer was successfully selected based on the combined results of both technical and behavioural assessment.