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Design cost overrun is one of the prominent factor that can impact the sustainable delivery of the project. It can be encountered due to a lack of information flow, design variation, etc. thereby impacting the project budget, waste generation and schedule. An overarching impact of this is witnessed in the sustainability dimensions of the project, mainly in terms of economic and environmental aspects. This work, therefore, aims to assess the implications of a technological process, in the form of building information modelling (BIM), that can smoothen the design process and mitigate the risks, thus impacting the sustainability of the project holistically.

The identified design risks in construction projects from the literature were initially analysed using a fuzzy inference system (FIS). This was followed by the focus group discussion with the project experts to understand the role of BIM in mitigating the project risks and, in turn, fulfilling the sustainability dimensions.

The FIS-based risk assessment found seven risks under the intolerable category for which the BIM functionalities associated with the common data environment (CDE), data storage and exchange and improved project visualization were studied as mitigation approaches. The obtained benefits were then subsequently corroborated with the achievement of three sustainability dimensions.

The conducted study strengthens the argument for the adoption of technological tools in the construction industry as they can serve multifaceted advantages. This has been shown through the use of BIM in risk mitigation, which inherently impacts project sustainability holistically.

The impact of BIM on all three dimensions of sustainability, i.e. social, economic and environmental, through its use in the mitigation of critical risks was one of the important findings. It presented a different picture as opposed to other studies that have mainly been dominated by the use of BIM to achieve environmental sustainability.

Stakeholder assessment is based on attributes possessed by stakeholders, making the process heavily reliant on evaluating attribute weights. The present assessment methods are based on Analytical Hierarchy Process, Analytical Network Process, and pairwise comparisons that heavily rely on decision-makers’ skills and knowledge. An objective evaluation of attribute weight needs to be done to overcome this challenge.

A Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) based approach, through the combined use of Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods has been incorporated to objectively evaluate the weights of the stakeholder attributes and their ranking with a specific focus on construction megaprojects. Five stakeholder attributes and twelve commonly associated stakeholders with megaprojects were considered to achieve this.

The new model presented power, durability and legitimacy as three important stakeholder attributes, further used to determine stakeholder importance. The client, contractor and project manager were identified as the top three internal stakeholders, and customers, local community and utility service providers as three crucial external stakeholders.

The findings from the proposed method provide the practitioners with updated information about the attributes they need to look into when planning stakeholder involvement and management. Further, it also leads them to the established framework for the provided stakeholder ranking when planning their management strategies.

The use of CRITIC method allowed to address the possibility of any correlation between the attributes in their weight determination. This was one of the advantages as co-relation between the attributes during their weight determination has not been addressed in previous methods.

The Indian public sector construction industry is normally driven by traditional contracting practices. Though no formal partnering agreement is being used in public sector projects in India, improvement in Indian public sector organizations could be observed in the post-liberalization era, as they get the opportunities to work with multinational companies from countries with experiences in partnering. The purpose of this study is to explore the extent of partnering strategies being adopted by Indian public sector organizations and identify factors hindering the adoption of formal partnering.

Critical success factors for successful partnering were first identified through literature review. This guided the collection of primary data through semi-structured interviews with 36 top management personnel and secondary data in the form of organizational documents and site reports from several site visits of four public sector construction organizations. The evidence collected from four cases were arranged and compared against organizational strategies of successful partnering.

Most of the strategies adopted by the organizations were found to be in line with the suggested partnering practices. However, partnering performance of these organizations was found to be not satisfactory. This study has identified 14 factors hindering effective partnering such as reservations over joint risk-sharing process, limited bid evaluation criteria, difficulty in time-bound payment to contractor, absence of incentive mechanism, obsolete training procedures and absence of time-bound dispute resolution mechanism.

The research findings are based on a case study with four public sector organizations only. Additional cases need to be undertaken to generalize the findings. Further study should also be undertaken to explore partnering relationships between contractors and subcontractors in public sector projects.

To improve project performance, top management of public sector organizations in India can take these factors into account while formulating strategies on introduction of project partnering in their organizations.

The work is novel providing insights into organizational strategies promoting and hindering partnering in Indian public sector construction organizations.