Projects
Early Contractor Involvement
Oct 19 , 2026
A new model to mitigate contemporary infrastructure risks.
In infrastructure projects, as with most major investments, it’s what you don’t know that tends to undo the best laid plans.
Early Contractor Involvement, or ECI, is emerging as a very effective way to help project owners identify, address and mitigate the many potential risks in a project, before anything is set in contract.
A collaborative project development process, ECI allows project owners to identify the risks and opportunities available to them. These can include challenges owners may be unaware of, which may be more evident to contractors, and innovations which can:
Australia’s major public infrastructure pipeline is expected to top $240billion over the coming five years, a 14% increase compared to last year. Complex major investment programs are drawing on the same finite pool of labour, materials and delivery capacity, placing significant pressure on the industry’s ability to deliver efficiently.
It’s a balance of risk and certainty.
Contractors are less willing to take on the increased risk, especially if they have little say in the initial structuring of the project, little input in the constructability of the design and no clear ideas of considerations like geo-technical issues or community engagement.
Project owners seek greater certainty over cost, schedule and delivery outcomes, especially when faced with less predictable supply chains, a constrained market capacity and increasing project complexities.
ECI provides many of the answers project owners are looking for.
ECI is a collaborative procurement approach that brings the contractor into the project development process before design, scope and price are finalised. Its core purpose is to help project owners and contractors develop a shared understanding of scope, risk, cost and program before the parties commit to a delivery contract.
This is achieved through a defined and collaborative development phase where the contractor works alongside the client team, including designers and technical advisors, to test constructability, refine scope, resolve technical risks and develop a credible cost and delivery program. Expectations for all parties are clarified and managed. The solution is more clearly defined and the cost and program more developed.
As a result, the path to delivery is often faster as issues which would become apparent later, in the tender or construction stages, are identified and resolved. This allows the parties to more clearly identify the most appropriate delivery contract, such as design and construct, alliance, managing contractor or incentivised target cost (ITC).
ECIs are resource intensive. The process is time consuming, places demands on procurement and transaction resources, and requires a genuine commitment to confidentiality. While the benefits are noticeable, the cost implications must be considered.
A foundational ECI decision is whether to engage one contractor (sole ECI) or two (dual ECI).
A dual ECI maintains competitive tension and provides a fallback if one proponent underperforms. However, ECIs are resource-intensive and a dual ECI can make the process highly complex and harder to execute effectively.
A sole ECI can be effective, but requires a highly disciplined client team to manage the increased price and scope risk that comes with removing competitive tension.
The choice is often driven by circumstance, such as information sensitivity or constrained timeframes.
It is worth noting, while some have tried triple ECIs, these can become unwieldy, time consuming and costly, often negating the benefits of the process. Before committing to any form of ECI, careful thought must be given to the size and complexity of the project and the willingness of the market to participate.
ECI is occasionally adopted as a good collaborative practice. However, in some cases, it may not be required, particularly where the solution is tried and tested, the scope is well defined and risk is low. In these cases, collaboration for its own sake is not the objective, and a standard lump sum tender may remain the most efficient procurement path.
ECI is best deployed when there are unknown unknowns, where the project owner acknowledges there are factors which add uncertainty to the project, such as undefined scope, unresolved technical risk, or novel conditions that no single party can confidently price, schedule or manage in isolation.
Timing is central to the value of ECI. Any ability to influence cost, scope, schedule and outcomes declines sharply as design and procurement decisions become fixed. At the same time, the cost of change rises significantly as a project progresses: a change made during feasibility may require little more than a design revision, while the same change during construction can trigger rework, demolition, additional cost and significant delay.
ECI brings contractor expertise into this high-influence, low-cost window, allowing constructability, scope, risk and cost issues to be identified and resolved before they become construction problems.
That said, engaging too early carries its own risk. If a project is brought to market before its objectives, funding position, and site conditions are reasonably understood, contractor risk and pricing inputs becomes more speculative. This could result in a process that consumes additional time and cost without producing a better outcome than would have emerged from further internal development.
While ECI is one of a number of collaborative options available to project owners, it is fast becoming the preferred method for contractors.
For example, an interactive, reimbursable RFP process can achieve some of the same collaborative benefits as ECI – supporting contractor dialogue during tender, allowing information exchange, and scope refinement ahead of award. However, contractors will typically remain in a competitive tender posture rather than a genuinely collaborative delivery relationship, holding price and risk positions close. The project owner also retains greater responsibility for resolving technical and scope uncertainty before a contractor is meaningfully engaged.
ECI is generally preferred over an interactive RFP process where risk and uncertainty are high enough that a genuine two-way problem-solving relationship is needed to develop a robust, well-priced delivery solution.
MBB’s experience in collaborative approaches spans ECI, PPP, ITC, Alliance, and EPC delivery models across road, transport, energy, housing, defence, and port infrastructure programs.
Across this work, we’ve seen the practical effects of this shift firsthand. When performed well, outcomes have included innovative staging and construction sequencing decisions, compressed development and procurement timeframes, and robust commercial frameworks that share risk and reward across the supply chain.
As well as providing clear insights into how collaborative, contestable and commercially robust delivery strategies are designed, informed, benchmarked, analysed and applied, we have guided clients past the real risks posed by unclear processes, rushed project establishment or poor management practices. These risks can result in cost and program outcomes drifting away from client expectations, unclear risk allocation between parties, and a loss of the competitive tension needed to test value for money before commercial terms are locked in.
Across the engagements we have advised on, we have observed successful ECIs are the product of a series of well-informed choices made throughout the project lifecycle, often well before market engagement, and with consequences that may not become apparent until the ECI is in delivery.
In our experience, there are three defined areas of benefit.
Good preparation enables better ECI design, good design creates the conditions for productive collaboration and a well-run ECI converts that collaboration into a delivery-ready project.
The quality of an ECI is heavily influenced by how ready the project and organisation are before entering the market. Deferring unresolved issues simply pushes risk into the ECI, where it is more expensive and disruptive to address. Effective preparation creates alignment, decision-making capacity and a clear mandate for the ECI, allowing the process to start with momentum rather than spend its early stages resolving avoidable uncertainty.
At the end of this stage, the project should be ECI market-ready, aligned on its objectives, risks and decision-making, with the organisation capable of actively supporting the ECI.
Good preparation for ECI includes clearly establishing and agreeing project outcomes, objectives, constraints, non-negotiables , and aligning key internal stakeholders and decision makers before commencing the ECI.
How an ECI is designed determines how much value it can create in the long-term. The objective is to preserve commercial leverage while allowing technical certainty to develop. This must be done while also ensuring the parties have the right incentives to resolve uncertainty rather than defer it, while remaining sufficiently flexible to respond as the project develops.
This can include front-loading the commercial negotiations while competitive tension still exists, allowing the ECI to focus on technical development, including the maintainer or operator into the ECI process, and using an advanced works structure to de-risk critical activities early without forcing premature commitment.
At the end of this stage, the ECI should have a clear commercial and technical framework, with both parties understanding how decisions will be made and value created.
Once an ECI is underway, the priority should be to maintain momentum while resolving the uncertainties that could otherwise delay delivery. The objective is not to eliminate every uncertainty, but to distinguish between those that require resolution and those that can be managed through the delivery phase. Effective execution enables faster decisions, keeps the parties aligned and prevents the ECI from becoming an extended design or negotiation exercise.
Considerations include embedding client resources within the constructor teams to resolve issues and test submissions in real time, creating a structured mechanism and environment for proponent-driven innovation, and incorporating sufficient transparency to absorb major change without restarting the process.
At the end of this stage, the project should have sufficient certainty to make the transition into delivery without unnecessary delay, with the critical decisions already made and the remaining risks understood and manageable.
As noted previously, Australia’s infrastructure challenge is becoming more complex. With a finite pool of labour, materials and delivery capacity, and a market less willing to accept increased risk, the need to assure delivery is placing significant pressure on project owners.
Early Contractor Involvement provides a clear and effective way for project owners to identify, understand and deal with the unknown unknowns, while working in a genuinely collaborative relationship with contractors to minimise and allocate risk on projects.
To find out how MBB can bolster your understanding of the possibilities of ECI, please get in touch here.