Contractors sometimes take the role of owner support, i.e. providing an owner organisation with competent resources and possibly processes and systems to oversee a major industrial project and other contractors. This type of service actually involves quite a different mindset and setup compared to a normal contractor posture. Our new White Paper [2022-05] ‘From Contractor to Owner Support Roles: how to deal with a very different role’, building on PVD experience supporting organisations in this transition, exposes what needs to be changed in that case.
Owner support contractors are essential contributors to industrial projects when owner project management organisations are not well developed. A number of precautions must be taken when choosing such owner support teams, to avoid untoward conflicts of interest between the owner support role and other roles on the project and to ensure that they adopt an owner mindset rather than a contractor mindset.
While basic technical competencies are similar, it takes time to change the mindset of contractors’ team members to become part of an owner support team, and this needs to be identified and anticipated through proper change management. If an organisation provides both owner support and execution contracting services, we recommend that those activities be performed in two separate business units because the business and success drivers are different.
In any case, as a matter of good practice, the owner in any case needs to keep or develop sufficient capabilities in-house to supervise its interests in the project, and in particular to supervise the owner support contractor itself.
Read our new White Paper [2022-05] ‘From Contractor to Owner Support Roles: how to deal with a very different role’ to understand better the differences in position between the two roles and how to ensure that a proper owner support posture is taken.
If you can’t access the link to the white paper, copy and paste the following link in your browser: https://www.projectvaluedelivery.com/_library/2023-05_contractor_to_owner_assist_v1.pdf
