Managing complex transport infrastructure projects in an institutionally fragmented setting

Complex construction projects face a dilemma: perspectives and interests of clients and project managers may diverge and even be contradictive. This dilemma is especially manifest in the management of the performance benchmarks time, cost, scope and quality. Administrators hold to pre-established benchmarks, while project managers have an interest in relaxing them, in order to be able to realize the project. When these two contradictory interests are not reconsolidated, either the benchmarks are not met, or they will be traded off in an uncontrolled way, which even may lead to project failure. This management trap is best to be avoided when designing the contract between client and contractors and the drawing up of the terms of reference. Due to the complexity that characterizes a lot of public projects, this is not always possible. With RandstadRail as example, we will show in this paper what problems may occur in these situations and how they can be dealt with.