“Best for Project” is a powerful principle only when the people expected to apply it have the authority, information and accountability needed to make real decisions.
The Victorian alliance model describes an integrated structure in which representatives from the owner and non-owner participants work through a shared leadership and delivery system. The Alliance Leadership Team provides strategic direction. The Alliance Manager leads the management structure. The Alliance Management Team handles day-to-day leadership. The Alliance Project Team brings together people from participant organisations on a “best person for the job” basis.
The stated intention is to create something close to a single virtual organisation.
That design solves one problem and creates another.
It reduces the friction created by organisational silos, but it also forces leaders to answer a difficult question:
When an individual acts in the interest of the project, where does accountability ultimately sit?
The Strategic Context
Projects fail at interfaces.
Design decisions affect construction. Construction choices affect operations. Commercial decisions affect risk. Stakeholder commitments affect schedule. Separate organisations often optimise within their own boundaries because their contracts, incentives and reporting structures encourage them to do so.
Alliancing tries to move the boundary.
Instead of each party protecting its own position first, participants are expected to collaborate around agreed project outcomes.
This can materially improve decision speed and system-level optimisation.
But integrated decision-making is sustainable only if authority is clear.
A project cannot rely on every significant issue being escalated to corporate headquarters. Nor can representatives make commitments that their organisations later refuse to honour.
What Leaders Commonly Misread
The first mistake is assuming that seniority equals authority.
A respected executive may sit on an Alliance Leadership Team but still lack delegated power to approve major commercial or legal decisions.
The second mistake is assuming that joint decision-making automatically creates joint accountability.
Shared discussion is not the same as clear ownership.
The third mistake is allowing the project organisation and the parent organisations to maintain conflicting governance processes.
If the alliance approves one decision but a participant’s internal process can later reverse it, the virtual organisation is not actually empowered.
The fourth mistake is using “Best for Project” as a substitute for decision criteria.
A principle without boundaries can create inconsistent judgement.
Reframing the Issue
The alliance should be designed as a governed temporary enterprise.
That means the project needs more than a team chart.
It needs a decision architecture.
For each major decision class, the alliance should know:
- who recommends;
- who approves;
- who must be consulted;
- who carries operational accountability;
- which decisions require parent-organisation approval;
- what happens when consensus cannot be reached.
This turns collaboration into executable governance.
Strategic Analysis
The concept of a virtual organisation is useful because it shifts attention away from employer identity and towards project capability.
The strongest engineer may come from the owner.
The strongest commercial manager may come from a contractor.
The best planning specialist may come from another participant.
If appointments are made on project need rather than organisational entitlement, the alliance can deploy capability more effectively.
But this also changes power.
Traditional hierarchies may be disrupted. Corporate representatives may feel that their organisation is underrepresented. People may receive direction from managers employed by another participant.
The alliance therefore needs explicit rules for role accountability, performance management and employment interfaces.
Without them, integration can become confusion.
Best for Project and Corporate Duty
“Best for Project” should not be interpreted as requiring participants to ignore their legal or corporate obligations.
A more disciplined interpretation is:
Within the authorised alliance framework, make decisions that best achieve the agreed project objectives and value proposition.
That means boundaries matter.
If a decision falls outside delegated authority, it should move into an agreed escalation process.
If a participant faces a genuine conflict, that conflict should be surfaced rather than hidden behind collaborative language.
The integrity of the alliance depends on recognising those tensions openly.
Decision Framework
A practical alliance decision-rights model should cover five layers.
Strategic decisions
Scope changes, major risk decisions, significant commercial adjustments and changes to project objectives should sit with appropriately authorised leadership.
Management decisions
Resource allocation, work planning, performance intervention and cross-functional coordination should sit with the management team.
Delivery decisions
Technical and operational choices should be delegated as close as possible to the people doing the work, within agreed boundaries.
Parent-organisation decisions
Matters such as corporate guarantees, major legal departures, exceptional funding or decisions outside alliance authority should remain with the relevant participant.
Escalation
The alliance should define how disagreement moves through the system and what happens if consensus is not achieved.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediate action: create a decision-rights matrix before mobilisation. Do not rely only on role titles.
Medium-term capability building: train leaders to distinguish project interest, participant interest and matters that require formal escalation.
Long-term strategic positioning: assess whether alliance governance actually reduces decision latency and interface conflict. If it does not, the structure may be integrated in appearance but fragmented in practice.
The owner should also preserve institutional memory about which governance arrangements helped or hindered future alliances.
Signals to Monitor
Watch for decisions repeatedly being reopened by parent organisations, senior alliance members lacking authority to commit, routine issues escalating unnecessarily, unclear ownership of risk actions, or integrated teams receiving conflicting instructions from project and corporate management.
Another signal is “Best for Project” being invoked selectively, particularly when a decision shifts cost or risk between participants.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- Which decisions can the alliance make without returning to parent organisations?
- Are senior representatives actually authorised to bind their participants?
- Where is operational accountability located when risk is commercially shared?
- How are conflicts between project and corporate interests surfaced?
- What happens if consensus fails?
- Are technical decisions delegated close enough to the work?
- How will we know whether the virtual organisation is functioning as one system rather than several colocated organisations?
Closing Perspective
A virtual organisation becomes real only when its decisions are real.
“Best for Project” is not a cultural slogan. It is a governance commitment that requires delegated authority, explicit boundaries and visible accountability.
The more integrated the alliance becomes, the more important those controls are.
Related article: Alliance Contracting Is a Governance Model, Not a Trust Exercise
Related article: Select the Relationship Before You Price the Project: Why Alliance Procurement Uses Interactive Development
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