The Construction Gigaprojects Report

Construction “gigaprojects” are initiatives with expenses of well over $1 billion and which involve time periods of well over five years. They are engagements whose extraordinary size, duration and complexity might induce even the most seasoned of project professionals to rethink how they “do contracts.” The prospect of a gigaproject does not so much raise new questions as call for the careful reconsideration of otherwise established answers. What alternative forms of contracting might one use, how might they allocate economic and project risks, and what compensation might drive the parties’ behavior?

In Construction Gigaprojects, colleague Rob James brings to bear his more than 40 years of experience with complex energy, construction and infrastructure transactions to place the immense array of challenges accompanying such endeavors in perspective. In the report, Rob addresses transfers of risk and schemes of compensation both as a static matter—for an entire engagement—and as a dynamic matter that morphs over different times or among different scopes of work. He considers how good or poor execution can affect the success of a project, no matter what contract form is used.

The result is an often illuminating breakdown of how, exactly, gigaproject contracting is different, or at a minimum how gigaprojects—and the “gigarisks” that accompany them—should lead the project professional to think afresh.