Alliance model was the key to success in building the Lakeside Road Tunnel in Tampere

The construction site of the Lakeside Tunnel is crucially sited in the middle of the industrial city, underneath old buildings, roads, a railway and a river link. The central section dives into a large tunnel over 2. km and there are partially underground interchanges and ramps excavated at each end.

The alliance was created and set up with a chosen contractor before the target price for the job was agreed. In the beginning there was a competitive process with the contractors with assessment on a series of criteria according to technical ability, the nature of the resources and the team they will bring to the project. In the Lakeside Road tunnel this started with a five-way competitive process, narrowed down to two and eventually the final consortium was selected.

In the project the contractor and designers worked together in an "alliancing" scheme, a system imported from Australia and one of the first major uses of the method in Europe.

The alliance team worked through the detail design process for several months before the project began on the ground, particularly to pin down all the risk elements rather than oblige the contractor to price them into the contract with all the possibilities for claims and conflicts. The alliance shared the risks of the project using agreed pain-gain formulas. In practice, this meant that cost overruns or schedule and cost savings produced a penalty or benefit for both the client and the contractor.