I recently attended the DBIA Florida Annual Conference. H&H works for FDOT, THEA, and other Florida-based clients, and I kept hearing the same thing: this state delivers more projects, in more ways, than anywhere else in the country. I wanted to understand why.
My takeaway: trust and collaboration. And down there, those aren’t buzzwords.
I saw it in how people interacted between sessions and at the social gatherings around the conference, owners, contractors, and engineers talking to each other like people who’d be working together again next year, not like counterparties on opposite sides of a contract. I saw it again in the technical presentations, described in detail, session after session. Two examples in particular have stuck with me.
FDOT Is Scoring Teams on Collaboration, Not Just Asking For It
Talking with contractors and consultants working on the Moving I-4 Forward Program, I learned FDOT has been using something called Modified Phased Design-Build (MPDB). It takes Progressive Design-Build, a delivery method only just starting to get traction in the industry, and pushes it a step further toward collaboration.
Here’s how it works: once the shortlist is set, teams enter what FDOT calls the Accelerated Innovation and Collaboration (AIC) Phase. Each team is paid at a standard DOT project multiplier, on a budget set at roughly 1.5% of project value, specifically so nobody has to negotiate a price just to participate. For three to four months, teams work closely with FDOT developing their own project-specific innovations. At the end of that phase, they submit a Guaranteed Maximum Price along with their schedule and technical proposal.
Here’s the part that got my attention: FDOT actually scores the level of collaboration and commitment each team showed during the AIC phase. Collaboration isn’t a soft factor in the selection; it’s a scored criterion, and getting to know the key players on each team is a real part of how the winner gets picked.
THEA Didn’t Let Innovation Stop at Award
I also sat in on a session on the South Selmon project, presented by Greg Deese, Director of Operations and Engineering, on rethinking risk and innovation. H&H is the EOR for this project, which was procured through a more traditional Adjusted Score Design-Build process, essentially a best-value DB. But THEA didn’t want innovation to stop once the contract was awarded.
So post-award, they created an Accelerated Scope Augmentation Phase (ASAP), where technical leads from the consultant, contractor, and owner kept meeting to discuss modifications that could improve delivery. It functioned a lot like the pre-award collaboration you’d see in ACT development or one-on-one owner meetings, except now, with the ink already dry, those conversations could be more open and transparent, which meant only the most impactful changes actually made it into the project.
The Common Thread
Neither of these projects treats collaboration as a value everyone nods along to in a kickoff meeting. Both built a specific mechanism, a scoring criterion, and a formal post-award phase, to make sure it actually happened. That’s the difference between collaboration as a buzzword and collaboration as infrastructure.
What This Means Outside Florida
In my experience, most owners tend to capture only part of what alternative delivery can offer, usually schedule, sometimes cost. What I saw in Florida is that once you build delivery around collaboration as the mechanism, not just the mindset, all of it becomes reachable at once: shorter durations, fewer change orders, lower costs, and genuinely better ideas.
I don’t think the most useful question for owners looking at alternative delivery is “which method is best.” I think it’s whether the team delivering it has a real mechanism for trust and collaboration built in — but as something that is scored, structured, and compensated.
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