After 20 years in alternative delivery, I’ve never seen the word “trust” in an RFP. That’s the thing, the contract doesn’t build trust. The people do.
I’ve sat on both sides of the table, as the Engineer of Record on a design-build teams working with an Owner’s Rep, and as the Owner’s Rep myself, representing and advising an agency directly. The projects that struggled almost always had the same root cause: someone at the table didn’t trust the process, so they didn’t trust the people in it. When there is a lack of confidence in the delivery procedures, that uncertainty can extend to the entire design-build project team, affecting every RFI, every review cycle, every field issue encountered.
The projects that succeeded had something else in common: an Owner and an Owner’s Rep who understood both the contract and the practical realities of design-build, and who saw their job as facilitating decisions and managing risk, not recreating low-bid construction administration with extra paperwork and unnecessary restrictions.
Alternative delivery works best when it becomes a program, not a one-off experiment. I’ve seen this play out in two very different states — both successful, for different reasons. One has a mature, established alternative delivery program where the industry knows exactly what to expect. The other is aggressively expanding its toolbox, adding new delivery tools as it goes. Different approaches, but same result because in both cases, the right mindset shows up at execution. Good contracts establish accountability. Relationships determine how you get through the hard parts.
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