During the most recent AGC BIM Forum conference, held two weeks ago in La Quinta, CA, "trust" was a returning theme during the various presentations and discussions that I attended. Probably "trust", as in "the ability to count on each stakeholder's work" can be considered the most important constraint for IPD projects to be successful.
Because in IPD project risk and profit are shared amongst the stakeholders, participants need to rely heavily on the quality and timely delivery of each other's work.
Where contracts and claims take care of reaching a certain ‘comfort level' in the more traditionally organized projects, craftsmanship and good communication are critical in IPD to let managers sleep calmly.
"We caught ourselves calculating the ETC (Estimate To Complete) more frequently", as John Tocci stated during his presentation about the new Autodesk office project, currently built using an IPD contract, expressing the need for continuous insight in the project's status.
Craftsmanship can never replace by better information technology in construction. However, with BIM technology such as Virtual Construction teams can provide all stakeholders with the same view on the project and derived constructability, cost and schedule information, which greatly enhances the communicative capabilities of project teams, as exemplified by presentations such as the valuable Weitz/SCI contribution to the conference.
During the software forum panel discussion, an important topic was ‘change management', where we talked about how to support the need for ‘bite size' and role specific project information. With building contractors turning into ‘change managers', it is extremely important to not only understand the current status of the project, but also to understand which decisions got the team there.
During the development of the upcoming "Vico Office" software, we are continuously keep this in mind - our goal is to provide (IPD) project teams with tools that helps them to focus on craftsmanship, not on explaining project data!