Implementing The Ppp Approach Into Education

Facing a worldwide growing market for Public Private Partnership projects on national and international level it is understood that there is an increasing need for interdisciplinary and intercultural competences in the teams developing the projects. As project teams are more and more globally distributed also cutting-edge technical solutions for their collaboration is required. This paper describes the efforts of the pbl-Laboratory at Stanford University, USA and the Knowledge Center@Weimar at Bauhaus-University, Germany to implement these professional needs of the PPP market into the education of students as a project based learning experience. The development of this joint effort is presented, the steps taken to implement the Lifecycle approach explained and the experience of the project assessed. For many years the Stanford University has been carrying out the reputable AEC Global Teamwork Project where students of Architecture, Structural Engineering and Construction Management work on an interdisciplinary and intercultural base on complex construction projects. The AEC Project like no other student project contributes to the objective to provide students with the professional skills needed. Five years ago Bauhaus students also joint the program. Since this year the Knowledge Center@Weimar also contributes to the assignment of the project: A fourth discipline, the Financial Advisor, has been implemented into the team in close collaboration between the two institutions. The objective of adding this discipline is to raise the understanding for the change of paradigm to integrated and life cycle cost focused design and planning. Questions to be answered: - How do project teams considering a building's life cycle work differently with respect to concept development, issues discussed in comparison to teams considering the construction phase only? - Do they interact differently among the disciplines? - Do they use the collaboration technologies differently? - What is each disciplines understanding of a buildings life cycle, of risk management? - How does the team integrate the financial advisor? // The paper identifies the steps taken to develop the project assignment considering the real life situation in PPP projects. Thereby, the typical attributes of PPP projects such as life cycle considerations, risk allocation, performance oriented payments and partly output specifications have been implemented. While the team is developing the project their working process and products are observed. A comparison is done showing the differences between a project team considering the construction phase only. On the one hand the AEC Project prepares students for the highly specified requirements and the complexity of PPP projects. On the other hand they also learn project based how to collaborate on international, intercultural and interdisciplinary bases. With the ideas of PPP considering the entire life cycle of a project implemented into education there is a good chance that future projects can be conducted more successfully with a project team understanding how to work globally and to use collaboration technologies to work efficiently.