Books

Early Contractor Involvement: improving the management of contract risk

Published in January 2025, this book was co-authored with three other practicioners and is the first new book on Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) for 15 years. It explains how to structure, draft, procure and administer a two-stage tender contract giving (to quote the cover) "much needed practical insight into the optimal use of ECI as a procurement approach".

Jon wrote three (of the nine) chapters on

• 'Early contractor involvement models: their pros and cons and when to use them' covering the origins of ECI, its generic pros and cons before moving onto the six current architypes for a contract between two parties and the three architypes for alliancing arrangements between three or more parties. For each, what they are, their pros and cons and when to use them is covered.
• 'The Client's perspective' is based on Jon's experience of working with clients and covers the critical elements to get right including getting really clear and specific about the project's objectives, understanding risk, allocating and sharing risk intelligently, having a well-defined process to arrive at the Prices for Stage Two and getting open-book accounting set-up right from the start.
• 'The Project Manager's perspective' covering key competencies, walking the tight rope of impartial administration versus representing the Client's best interests and being empowered by the Client to act as described in the contract and setting the contract off on the right foot.

Jon also contributed to the 'Conclusion and key points' chapter. 

The book is available from Emerald, the publisher, here or from Amazon here.

NEC4: A USER'S GUIDE

Within 2 hours of the announcement that the NEC3 family of contracts was to be updated to a fourth edition (NEC4), the publisher of the previous editions of this book had contacted Jon to ask him to update his User's Guide. Jon obliged !

The book follows the structure of his top-selling NEC3 book - see below - and like its predecessor was updated to reflect the substantial changes made to the family of contracts and a further 12 years of Jon's consultancy experience. In particular, it expanded the text on contract strategy and writing good quality contract documentation. As before, it is written in an engaging style giving many practical examples to illustrate good practice.

Published in late 2021, one reviewer stated "Back in 2012, I thought that Jon Broome's NEC3 Guide was the best NEC book I had seen; now this new NEC4 edition is certainly the best" and another "This should be everyone's go-to guide for advice whether you are new to NEC contracts or a seasoned experienced professional". It went on to be the top-selling book from the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE Publishing) on any subject in 2022.

On Amazon, 15 reviewers give it 4.5 out of 5 stars with one stating it is a "Brilliant book" and "a must for those who are used to NEC contracts and those who are not familiar". Another stated "Very informative, engaging and an easy read which is a tall order for this topic". It is available here.

Procuring for Agile Projects

This white paper was published in 2020 by the Association for Project Management (APM) and addresses how you can develop a contract, select a provider and manage the contract for any series of projects where there is are flexible and evolving needs, risks and/or constraints.

While Jon wrote most of the text, this was after a working group from the APM's Contracts & Procurement SIG (now Interest Network) and agile practitioners had got together to flesh out what the white paper needed to cover and its structure. Having written it, it was then reviewed and improved by the same team.

The result is brief, but practical guidance peppered with examples from both the IT sector and more traditional sectors, but in environments of frequent change.

The guide can now be downloaded in pdf format for free from here.

APM Guide to Contracts and Procurement

The Association for Project Management’s (APM’s) ‘Guide to Contracts and Procurement for project, programme and portfolio managers’ was published in June 2017 with a launch event held a month later - see the videos from the event here.

Jon authored the early drafts of the first half of the guide and co-edited it with John Lake. As can be expected with anything Jon is involved in, it is very much a 'how-to' practitioner focussed guide providing a road map for the procurement and management of contracts for projects and programmes as opposed to the more academic reference type books.

A delegate at the launch conference, gave this feedback on it saying "it's a very user friendly and easily digestible guide with plenty of 'how' in it. I will certainly be making practical use of it on my next project. I'd even be so bold as to suggest every project manager who is procuring goods / services / 'other' as part of their scope should read this guide first...."

It is available both in a hard and soft copy format direct from APM here (and is free for members) or from Amazon (where has a rating of 4.7 stars), in Kindle or hard format here.

NEC3 : A USER'S GUIDE

This book, 'NEC3: A User's Guide', was published in 2009 updating Jon's first top-selling book on the subject - see below - in two main respects :

• it reflected the changes from the second edition to the third edition of the Engineering and Construction Contract and the broader NEC3 family of contracts and
• Jon's now substantial consultancy experience which enabled more real-life examples and anecdotes to be included as well as advances in best practice.

Like the previous edition, the first section gave the philosophy and ethos explaining the background and reasons for writing the contract, its three main objectives and how it achieves them as well as a quick run through of the contracts key clauses. The second section now covers best practice prior to contract award with the third section covering best practice having entered into the contract.

The book has numerous practitioner endorsements in it with one stating that "The book sets a standard that makes it the definitive NEC3 user's guide" and another "Of all the books out there on the NEC, this is quite the best I have seen. ... if there is one book that I would recommend you to read and then keep on your desk, it's this one".

It is the top rated NEC3 book on Amazon, with 74 reviewers giving it 4.5 out of 5 stars and one reviewer saying :

"it's the best and most enjoyable book I've ever read in on the subject (there's been a few!). It has taught me things and helped me understand things I haven't picked up after 6 years of working under / administering NEC3 contracts. It's fantastic and it should be a prerequisite for everyone to read it before working on a NEC3 contract."

It is available from Amazon here.

Procurement Routes for Partnering : a practical guide

Published in 2002, this book came about as result of Jon's two years post-doc research into collaborative contract strategies, initial consultancy experience and frustration with both the lack of literature on collaborative contract strategies and gross simplifications and naivety on this topic by other authors on partnering ! It was based on the premise that unless the commercial and contractual conditions align the parties' objectives, there is little stimulus to change the culture and integrate processes & teams to achieve the outstanding results that could be attained through partnering or collaborative working.

It turned into a magnum opus on the process of developing a contract strategy and the options available as you go through the process. Jon wrote it using accelerated learning principles, which included allowing the reader to skim read chapter and section summaries, with key points in bold, yet also dip into the detail when relevant.

A reviewer in the APM's Project magazine described it as "an essential read for the enthusiastic and ever learning project manager" as well as "a fundamental read for a wider audience" being "instructive without having to go too deep" yet containing "immense detail in parts". He summarised his review by stating "this book certainly fuflils its title and meets its objectives - an excellent read". 

Although subtitled 'a practical guide', for 15+ years, it was a standard reference for academic papers on contract strategy and much of it is still relevant today because the process and more standard contractual arrangements have not changed that much.

It is still (just about) available from Amazon here. 

The NEC Engineering and Construction Contract : A User's Guide

Jon's first book, titled 'The NEC Engineering and Construction Contract: A User's Guide' was published in 1999 and was based largely on his four and half years of research into the contracts use (which led to the world's first PhD on the topic) but with the more acedemic material taken out and Jon's initial consultancy experience included.

Unlike all other books on construction contracts at the time, it was not a sequential clause-by-clause legalistic dissection of the contract, but a practical 'how-to' guide on getting the best from using the contract as intended. It was divided into three sections :

• 'Philosophy and ethos' explaing the background and reasons for writing the contract, its three main objectives and how it achieved them as well as a quick run through of the contracts key clauses.
• 'User's experiences' from a number of perspectives and
• 'Implementation' covering both the pre-contract stages of preparing the contract, selecting the contractor and implementing it.

This unusual but practical structure led to it being the top-selling book on the second edition of NEC.

While severely out of date now, it is still available from Amazon here.