Value from an IPD perspective

This chapter focuses on value, not only value in its transactional economic sense but also in its social, environmental, value sense. Much value generated by project work is hidden and unrecognised. The value of knowledge gaining and innovation is touched on in this chapter and elsewhere in the book (see Chapter 11 and Chapter 18 in particular). Chapter 23 discusses value in terms of ethics and CSR and Chapter 14 discusses stakeholder value at length. We can see from the scope of this whole book that value generation and co-generation is closely linked to both integration and collaboration. Value does not stop at the project handover phase as Chapter 24 makes clear. The question originally raised in this chapter was: what is value in asset delivery? We have answered this question by raising the level of understanding to encompass value proposition of a broad range of valid stakeholders. Value to whom? The most banal and obvious value is the return on investment (ROI), which is a particularly ambiguous and misunderstood concept given that the highly transactional view restricts investment as financial (not commitment, energy, motivation and intellectual) input and return is simply calculated by monetary returns! We have stressed in this chapter that value is multi-faceted and that it is derived from a combination of people and resources (that includes digital and information technologies) in a combination that is complementary and supportive. We could summarise by saying that value generation and co-generation is institutionalised, as outlined in Chapter 2, and as Scott (2014) has argued, through governance or regulative regimes being put in place to promote and champion value creation.