doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7920-4_S1-P15-cd

ABSTRACT

Making decisions is a basic part of everyday life that is often taken for granted, but that does not diminish its importance. Whilst some decisions are just an instinctive ‘gut feeling’, others require more complex evaluations. When instinctive decisions are made, they are frequently processed subconsciously according to a set of internalized evaluation criteria that have been conditioned by personal preferences and exogenous factors. Inevitably, the risk of not achieving the desired outcome will be affected by the way the decision was arrived at. In selecting an integrated construction contract and procurement route, a low-risk rational approach incorporating the internal and external project conditions should be adopted. Failure to meet these prerequisites in a selection strategy, results in poor decisionswhere the expectations of stakeholders are rarely met and their risk exposure is higher than expected; the eventual outcome is an unsuccessful and unsustainable project. This paper outlines a framework for creating a linkage between the procurement route and contract selection method, and assessing the performance of that link in achieving a sustainable outcome. This investigation concludes with an evaluation of whether the better approach is qualitative or quantitative, and whether it should be probabilistic or deterministic. This discussion includes considerations of what level of intrinsic risk should be treated as acceptable in the decision process.

Keywords: Procurement route, Decision framework, Contract, Sustainability, Construction.

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