Influence of Interorganizational Coordination on Lifecycle Design Decision Making: Comparative Case Study of Public–Private Partnership Highway Projects

Abstract

Organizational structures in public-private partnerships (P3s) have the potential to decrease fragmentation and increase collaboration between key project-team stakeholders across the lifecycle phases of a project. These outcomes, in turn, also enhance the realization of an improved lifecycle design. In this exploratory study, the interorganizational coordination of three recent U.S. P3s was analyzed and the influences of the coordination on the lifecycle design decision-making processes were compared. For each of the three P3 projects, the authors conducted interviews with key project team members and collected project documentation, and these data were then analyzed to explore lifecycle design decision-making processes for each project. The empirical findings show how interorganizational coordination mechanisms influence the lifecycle design decision-making processes in P3s. The findings also show the ways that the coordination mechanisms resulted in improved or inhibited lifecycle design decision-making according to differences in the intended and actual implementation. As coordination mechanisms diminished, particularly iterative and over-the-shoulder design processes, lifecycle design effectiveness decreased. Conversely, effective implementation of key coordination mechanisms, such as a single point of contact and over-the-shoulder design reviews by downstream team members, improved lifecycle design processes. Ultimately, this study extends the growing body of knowledge for understanding the influence of P3 organizational structures.