The University of Texas at Austin

Changing Project Procurement Strategy:

The Delphi method will be used to validate and provide expert feedback on the Changing Project Procurement Strategy (CPPS) implementation framework developed for helping owner organizations in planning and implementing procurement change initiatives. This Delphi exercise proposes to further develop and validate a framework for implementing a change in project procurement strategy by state transportation agencies (STAs). The Changing Project Procurement Strategy (CPPS) implementation framework intends to assist STAs in implementing this change by providing a map of decisions significant to the new scenario. The problem of implementing such change has two main dimensions: (1) at the organizational level, the increase of delivery options provides challenges and opportunities to STA decision-makers; (2) at the project level, once a new delivery method has been selected there is the need to identify practices for its implementation. Thus, the proposed framework is divided in two levels to help STAs manage and regulate the implementation process and to provide project-induced input for organization-wide changes. The organizational level tries to identify new decision paths originated from the change while the project level component is intended to be used repetitively on a project basis until the state agency becomes familiar with the newly introduced project procurement approach.

Additionally at the organizational level, STA officers must both define the organizational project procurement strategy/process for identifying target projects and develop corresponding project procurement approaches. At the project level, if a project procurement approach new to the state agency has been selected, the STA project team must also implement the new approach. Consequently, the project level implementation depends on the selected project delivery method. In the proposed framework, this level focuses on the implementation of the Design-Build (DB) delivery method and follows this method�s cycle (i.e., DB contract procurement and DB contract execution). The project-level implementation process can, however, be customized to implement other delivery methods.