Project Alliances in Kuwait Construction Industry

As a way to of enhancing construction project delivery and improving their construction supply chains, many countries are encouraging their construction industries to embrace partnering. Construction firms in most developing countries are too small to carry out large construction projects alone. Thus, besides partnering between a client and a contractor, there is an incentive for forming alliances between contractors so that the emerging entities can handle large and sophisticated projects that they cannot do individually. Project Alliance (PA) is an agreement where parties enter into an agreement to work cooperatively and to share risk and reward measured against the performance indicators. The objectives of this study are to provide a review on PA concept, analyze different aspects of PAs, describe the success and failure factors of PAs in general, investigate the application of those factors on PAs and provide a thorough recommendation on how to deal and set up PAs in Kuwait construction industry. This study incorporates the components of construction industry (residential, commercial, industrial, infrastructure) in order to provide information that can help implementing PAs in Kuwait. In this study the data was collected using a questionnaire survey to determine the driving factors and potential barriers of PAs implementation in Kuwait construction industry. Driving factors for PAs were found to be governmental support to help establish project alliances, trust between all parties, commitments between all parties, collaboration between all parties, and careful team selection. Top five barriers for PAs were the lack of trust on other parties, hard formation of a single entity, lack of commitment from other parties, lack of early commercial development, and risk challenges. The research will contribute significantly to the fields of partnering by linking various aspects of drivers and barriers and shed light on future work which will examine a better understanding of PAs for the realization of construction projects. Keywords: Kuwait construction industry, Project Alliances, drivers, barriers.