Effective Partnering in Innovative Procured Multicultural Project

Abstract

Effective partnering has been shown to improve projects in numerous ways including cost, schedule, safety, quality, and claims. However, partnering in a multicultural, multiphase environment has some additional challenges. This paper describes some lessons learned from the Tren Urbano project in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a $1.5 billion, 17.2-km heavy-rail project. The Tren Urbano Project has an innovative procurement strategy of turnkey with multiple primes, which combined with the multiphase, multicultural project environment presents additional challenges for providing an effective partnering environment. A system dynamics partnering model was built to demonstrate that the partnering effort in the Tren Urbano project was adequate for a traditional procured, limited culture project. However, for a project like Tren Urbano, a greater partnering effort is needed to achieve the same results.