How could one provide a positive response of the material below to the author regarding using communication and accountability methods between stakeholders in PPPs? What positive comments can be provided and what questions can be asked to the author?

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I personally had never heard of the term PPP before. One of the videos we were assigned this week defines public-private partnerships as "any long-term arrangement whereby the public sector and the private sector are acting together to deliver services to the public". PPPs usually either deal with some form of infrastructure service or social activity. Now my understanding is that in order for the project to fall under the PPP umbrella, it must be a company that has always been privately owned working on a public project. The big difference being that all parties involved in the project are working together on it from day one instead of the designers, contractors, and maintenance team all coming in separately and in different phases of the project. Like all projects, communication and accountability are vital for the project's success. No matter the subject of the class, communication is a topic that has been drilled into us since day one and the same goes for accountability. With communication comes repetition and with accountability comes transparency.

Frequent meetings and multiple communication channels: When we have worked on projects that have a lot of people working on them all at the same time repetition is key. In order to ensure that everyone is on the same page, and that all the appropriate information has been relayed to the correct parties, you have to be adaptable and willing to repeat the information on multiple platforms. For example, if something comes up for the project, and the information is emailed out, not everyone is going to see the email right away so you might also want to make sure that you follow up with other parties via text, phone call, or bring it up at the next meeting that you have. Consistency in the form of communication that you choose is key, but it's also important to choose more than one form of communication so that everyone involved is comfortable with at least one of the options.

I personally would also make sure that there are frequent meetings during the planning and building phase of the project to ensure that everyone gets some face time together, so that we can discuss things as a group. Sometimes people interpret emails or messages differently, and the added help of seeing your team in person can be very beneficial to large projects. Once the building phase is done, and our main concern is up-keep, the meetings can become less frequent, but having a regularly scheduled meeting should still be a priority.

Thorough documentation and accessible platforms: Accountability and transparency, are high on my personal list of priorities for the simple fact that, if something is going wrong, I shouldn't have to waste time trying to figure out what happened, who did it or where the mistake originated from. The investigative work can be a colossal waste of time and it can become a bigger detriment to the project schedule. I would start by meeting with the entire team and creating a standardized file saving format that we could all access with file names that are easily found. Making sure that everything has a standard format that they must follow can make a huge difference when different team members are trying to access files for the same project. I would also try to employ some form of chain of evidence, so that we know exactly who worked on what, who approved what, when it was started, and when it was done.

I think doing these small things could make a huge difference for the project and the project team within a PPP arrangement.