We don't use a Transactional Contract for Marriage, Why for Projects?

Lean Design and Lean Construction Consultant, Trainer and Author, Alan Mossman of The Change Business says;

For the same reason that we don't use a bilateral transactional contract for marriage, we use a relational contract. It's now recognized that there's much more sense in using a relational contract for these long‑term arrangements where we need to work together to get things done.

Our conversation centers around The Last Planner® a project management system created by Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell co-founders of the Lean Construction Institute. In long term building projects, they have found that managing relationships is the important part of project management. Last week, I had a post that discussed this, Crucial & Collaborative Conversations for Predictable Design & Delivery and talked about it even more in this post, Is Relationship Mapping the new Critical Path?.

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Alan Mossman trained as an architect and worked for many years in management and organization development. He only returned to construction in 2000 building on his knowledge and understanding of collaboration, systems thinking, quality and lean. An accredited UK based Last Planner trainer, he has coached teams implementing Lean and Last Planner for a wide range of clients in Europe, Africa and Australasia. From 2004 to 2010 Alan was a founding Director of The Lean Construction Institute UK. He helped set up the Lean Construction Journal www.leanconstructionjournal.org and was co-editor from 2003 to 2012.

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