A Lean Perspective of Stakeholder Integration in Public Private Partnerships

Abstract

The Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) is the party representing the private sector in a Public Private Partnership (PPP), and combines a number of stakeholders including equity shareholders, designers, contractors, and service providers under one umbrella. Consequently, the key to ensuring successful project delivery is achieving an efficient integration of the different SPV stakeholders involved, to deliver the project as a unified entity. However, the SPV's stakeholder management role is highly under-investigated in the literature, and no studies have attempted to explore SPV stakeholder integration. This highlights a significant need to do so, considering that the former is both a prerequisite and a driver of PPP project success. This research aims to address this need through generating a list of SPV characteristics that reflect stakeholder collaboration and developing Critical Success Factors (CSFs) to measure the level of SPV stakeholder integration, based on concepts projected from the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) system. The aforementioned factors relate to the project's organization structures, commercial frameworks, and operating systems and processes. This research is the first of its kind that aims to investigate the SPV's integration level, from a holistic IPD perspective, as an enabler of successful relationship management.

IPD-inspired framework for measuring stakeholder integration in public-private partnerships

“…Being the fundamental cornerstone of SPV project delivery, stakeholder integration brings forward the former's correlation to IPD philosophy and systems (Malaeb and Hamzeh, 2018). IPD defines that stakeholder integration stems from three foundations: organization structures, contractual frameworks and operating systems and processes, as detailed by Thomsen et al (2009) and summarized below: Organization structures: IPD describes organization structures formed of integrated teams comprising key stakeholders and the early engagement of contractors to collaborate with designers.…”

“…This notion proposes a correlation between SPV operations and the integrated project delivery (IPD) system, being a delivery route founded on and aiming at stakeholder integration (Thomsen et al , 2009). Therefore, studying PPP success mandates a comprehensive assessment of the SPV’s stakeholder integration efficiency, which would benefit from the projection of collaboration factors from IPD considering the latter to be rich with research on integration (Malaeb and Hamzeh, 2018).…”