Industry leaders and research say adversarial RFPs worsen cost, schedule and quality outcomes; early contractor engagement, partnering charters and collaborative contract models can unlock productivity and make projects more attractive to scarce labour.
Anyone who has worked in construction knows how central the request‑for‑proposal is: it is the ritual that brings owners and general contractors together to turn drawings into buildings. But, as Nancy Novak — chief innovation officer at Dallas‑based Compass Datacenters — argues in Construction Dive, too many RFPs start as a battlefield rather than a table for collaboration. Novak writes that the reflex to foreground contractual risk and dense legalese turns a first conversation into “a preliminary battlefield” and even likens it to “being on a first date and starting an argument” — a dynamic she says sours trust at the moment that trust is most needed.
Novak’s diagnosis resonates with an expanding body of research and industry commentary that ties adversarial procurement to worse outcomes across cost, schedule, quality and safety. The Construction Industry Institute’s Model for Partnering Excellence, for example, treats partnering as a disciplined, measurable approach: aligned senior leadership, agreed objectives, joint problem‑solving and shared metrics. CII’s research finds partnering measurably reduces costs, shortens schedules and lowers claims and rework by creating more transparent, co‑operative teams. Similarly, McKinsey’s influential analysis of the sector argues that rewiring contractual frameworks and adopting collaborative procurement are central levers in a much‑needed productivity revolution — offering a potential global uplift in value‑added measured in the trillions if the sector modernises.
There is also an urgent market imperative. The Associated General Contractors’ 2024 workforce survey, cited by industry groups, reports a near‑universal struggle to find labour — 94% of firms say they are having trouble filling open positions and more than half say labour shortages are causing project delays. That scarcity makes contractors choosier about the clients and projects they accept; owners who make RFPs antagonistic risk being passed over. Novak’s point is blunt: in a market where qualified general contractors are in short supply, owners need to court partnership rather than assume advantage.
Practical evidence reinforces these high‑level diagnoses. An academic case study of Norwegian public projects found that unclear tender documentation, poor risk allocation and late contractor involvement are major drivers of disputes; early contractor engagement, by contrast, improves tender quality, constructability and shared understanding, and reduces the incidence of change orders and litigation. The Project Management Institute has also argued for relationship‑based procurement as a systemic alternative to transactional buying — recommending governance, aligned incentives and “no‑blame” cultures to promote innovation, safety and fewer disputes.
What does this mean for owners who write RFPs? The prescription is straightforward in intent, if sometimes difficult in execution: shift the RFP from an early contract negotiation to a forum for scope‑clarifying, solution‑oriented dialogue; invite contractor input before the RFP is finalised; and organise selection and evaluation around capability, constructability and shared objectives rather than only lowest‑price promises. Novak says Compass Datacenters has applied this approach internally and that early, open engagement with GCs has delivered “a level of partnership” that spurred innovation, cut costs and accelerated delivery — claims she frames as lived experience rather than hard metrics.
Industry toolkits point to concrete steps owners can adopt. CII offers a phased partnering framework and measurement benchmarks to guide implementation; PMI recommends embedding relationship procurement principles into governance and contract terms; McKinsey highlights early contractor involvement to unlock design optimisation and offsite solutions. Practically, owners can pilot pre‑RFP industry briefings, two‑stage tendering where affordable, partnering charters that set behaviours and dispute avoidance protocols, and contract forms that align incentives (for example, pain/gain share clauses or target price arrangements) rather than burying negotiation in dense legal provisions at the outset.
That said, real barriers exist. Public procurement rules, constrained preconstruction budgets and entrenched risk‑averse behaviours make early collaboration harder in many contexts, particularly for government projects. The Norwegian case study warns that procurement regulation and limited preconstruction funding can inhibit early engagement even where participants want it. Risk managers and legal teams are not being obstinate for its own sake: unclear allocation of liability has real financial consequences. The challenge for owners is to design processes that protect legitimate legal and fiduciary concerns while still enabling the open, technical dialogue that improves constructability and cost predictability.
A pragmatic way forward is iterative: test collaborative approaches on a small number of projects, measure outcomes against agreed KPIs, refine standard partnering language and scale what works. Procurement teams should be trained to evaluate proposals on more than price — assessing past performance, innovation proposals, safety records and proposed supply‑chain strategies — and should use structured partnering metrics so success is visible and repeatable. Digital tools and early design‑for‑manufacture thinking, both highlighted by McKinsey, can be integrated into RFPs to make contractor proposals more comparable and to reward prefabrication, BIM use and other productivity boosters.
Novak’s appeal is not simply idealistic: it is a commercial argument. Owners that demonstrate a genuine partnership mindset, she warns, will have a competitive edge in an environment where general contractors can pick and choose their work. Industry studies back that up: partnering and early contractor engagement are associated with fewer claims, faster delivery and higher quality. But converting that evidence into practice will require changes to procurement culture, contract templates and, in some cases, regulation.
If the aim is better projects — delivered on time, built to specification, safer and more economically — the RFP must be recast as the beginning of a relationship, not the opening salvo of a dispute. As Novak and multiple industry studies argue, a deliberate move towards pre‑RFP dialogue, collaborative contracting models and relationship‑centred procurement may be less about changing one document and more about rebuilding how owners and contractors learn to work together. In a constrained market with large backlogs and rising labour pressures, that shift may no longer be optional; it may be the difference between a stalled project and one that succeeds.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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