Ashwin Mahalingam

PPP Experiences in Indian Cities: Barriers, Enablers, and the Way Forward

Recent studies indicate that India must invest more than

Enabling conditions for the emergence and effective performance of technical and cultural boundary spanners in global virtual teams

150 billion over the next 5 years in the development of urban infrastructure. Urban local bodies lack the financial resources and the capacity to develop these projects on their own, pointing to a large role that public-private partnerships (PPPs) need to play in the development of urban infrastructure. This paper uses a combination of archival sources, case studies, and insights from a recently concluded roundtable discussion on PPPs to highlight five key barriers that PPP projects face in the urban Indian context. These barriers are a distrust between the public and private sector, a lack of political willingness to develop PPPs, the absence of an enabling institutional environment for PPPs, a lack of project preparation capacity on the part of the public sector, and poorly designed and structured PPP projects. A series of measures that the Government of India has undertaken to enable PPPs are evaluated and it is observed that these programs address only three of the five barriers identified. A set of nine additional strategies emanating from the roundtable are then proposed, that, in addition to the existing measures outlined by the Government of India, can help comprehensively address the challenges that PPPs in urban infrastructure that India is facing. This could help improve the quantity and quality of infrastructure services in Indian cities.

UNDERSTANDING AND MITIGATING CHALLENGES ON GLOBAL PROJECTS: THE ROLE OF THE FREELANCE EXPATRIATE

Globalization has led to a widespread increase in the practice of ‘offshore outsourcing’ of projects in the construction industry. This phenomenon has led to the development of a new form of organization—the ‘global virtual team’. Where much is explored in the extant literature on the ingredients affecting virtual team functioning, relatively little research has been done on the interaction of participants in virtual teams, the role of boundary spanners that bridge occupation and cultural boundaries and their impact on project performance. Motivated by this understanding, a research experiment was conducted wherein postgraduate engineering students from IIT Madras, India and Columbia University, USA, collaborated virtually to develop a computer-aided design model and an organizational simulation model of ongoing construction projects in the USA. We used social-network analysis to examine the performance of four teams that executed this academic exercise virtually over a period of three months. Team frater...

A Comparative Analysis of Public- Private Partnership (PPP) Coordination Agencies in India: What Works and What Doesn’t

Global construction projects that involve collaboration between participants from multiple countries result in unique challenges that are not faced on intra-national projects. In order to further investigate this phenomenon, we conducted detailed case studies on four, matched international construction projects – two in Taiwan and two in India. Through our study we found four key differences in institutionalized work practices that led to large challenges on projects. How were these institutional challenges mitigated? We found that a group of freelance professionals, hailing mainly from the UK but also from other parts of the British Commonwealth, acted as the mediators or catalysts in resolving these differences. In this paper we describe the types of problems that arose on the project and the nature of the expatriate freelance community. We also analyze some of the strategies adopted by its members, and the ways in which conflicts were solved.

Investigating the Role of Lean Practices in Enabling BIM Adoption: Evidence from Two Indian Cases

Public-Private Partnership (PPP) coordination agencies are often used to assist government agencies in structuring PPP arrangements. Very few studies have compared the performance of various coordination agencies to understand the characteristics that define an effective coordination agency. The authors study three coordination agencies that were involved in projects in the water and sanitation sector in India and observe their performance across five parameters: project structuring, commercial risk management, relational risk management, project handover, and extent of institutional strengthening. The authors find that agencies with administrative expertise in handling project structuring and bid process, coupled with PPP-specific expertise and an understanding of PPP risks, are a necessary but insufficient condition for project success. In conjunction, high involvement of the coordination agency through the lifecycle of the project or measures that enhance the capacity of government departments to understand and monitor PPPs are required to ensure that real benefits are delivered to stakeholders.

Unpacking the path-dependent process of institutional change for PPPs

AbstractConstruction projects continue to be plagued by cost and time overruns, primarily due to poor information-sharing between project participants. Building information modeling (BIM) has emerged as a digital platform through which project teams can share information better and improve project performance. However, many barriers to BIM adoption exist. The successful alignment of BIM technology with work processes as well as willingness to coordinate among project participants are considered most critical for successful BIM adoption. Lean construction practices address the issue of improving coordination within a project team and provide some recipes for how enhanced coordination can be brought about. While the use of BIM as a mediating intervention to enable effective lean practice implementation as an outcome has been documented, the use of lean practices as mediators for achieving enhanced levels of BIM use has not been adequately studied. This paper attempts to address this gap and understand if an...

Achieving reliability in transnational work on complex projects: new directions for research

In the recent past, several countries and states have begun to use Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure development and have attempted to create institutional environments that enable PPPs. Providing an enabling environment for PPPs entails a combination of institutional creation and changing existing institutions relating to project procurement. This paper attempts to understand how path-dependant institutional change takes place in the context of PPPs and their enabling environments, and why different institutional environments evolve differently, using two cases: the implementation of PPPs in the road sector in the Netherlands and in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. We identify two factors that can be used as predictors of the direction of institutional change: a long-term orientation towards institutional change and a willingness to learn and modify transitional institutions. Where these factors exist, and thereby provide a goodness of fit, institutional change is likely to occur

Governance issues in BOT based PPP infrastructure projects in India

The delivery of complex engineering projects today often involves globally distributed teams. In these teams, engineers must check for inadvertent errors by following the assumptions, logic and computations of others and define processes to reduce these errors. Engineering firms are thus increasingly using digital technologies to enable teams to do transnational work. While project management research on global virtual teams articulates how team performance relates to composition and characteristics, it has paid less attention to reliability and how this is achieved in such transnational work. This paper considers how constructs related to reliability—trust, culture and communication—become inter-related in work on complex projects. Recent research on work practice, which examines dynamics over time, is brought into dialogue with the literature on global virtual teams, re-conceptualizing trust as enacted in practice; culture as a resource for action and communication as a mediated dialogue. Vignettes from...

Competencies and urban Public Private Partnership projects in India: A case study analysis

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to identify the combinations of economic, normative, reputational and cognitive mechanisms that can prevent post‐award governance challenges on build‐operate‐transfer (BOT) projects in India.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses an empirical, case‐study based methodology to collect data and analyzes the cases through the use of the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) technique. The paper first identifies and classifies the various kinds of governance challenges and preventive mechanisms in BOT projects based on the extant literature. Empirical evidence on 11 BOT projects in India is gathered and QCA is employed to unearth the linkages between specific governance mechanisms and post‐award challenges on these projects.Findings – Project governance issues were identified across two dominant interfaces – one between the public and private sector and the other between the project and the societal stakeholders. Governance mechanisms based on providing shared incentiv...

A contested organizational field perspective of the diffusion of public–private partnership regimes: evidence from India

Abstract In India, the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model for project implementation has been gaining prominence as municipalities attempt to meet a growing demand for infrastructure services. However, weak competencies within urban local bodies (ULBs) present one of the primary bottlenecks to implementing PPPs in the delivery of urban services. In this paper we attempt to understand the kinds of competencies that are prevalent within ULBs in India, competencies that are often absent, strategies that are currently used to bridge these competency gaps, and approaches that ULBs should follow in order to create a more robust environment for PPPs. In order to do so, we first describe a competency framework for implementing urban PPP projects. We then adopt a case-based research approach to analyze five urban PPP projects. The case study analysis indicates that project development competencies are supplemented through the engagement of PPP coordination agencies. However, there are larger competency gaps in the area of project governance. The outcomes of this research study contribute to a growing body of knowledge on the performance of PPPs in developing countries and suggest areas for improvement in the existing institutional frameworks for urban PPP projects.