Planning

Construction Ahead, Expected Delays

It´s hard to finish a Construction Project without several changes in its original schedule. Managing the project to finish on time and within the budget is not an easy task.

Consequently, many projects end up in litigation.

Commonly, the project parties sit in a monthly meeting to discuss the project progress without knowing who is responsible for delaying the project.

Considering delay with acceleration increases the litigation potential because the owner might direct the contract to accelerate a project that has been delayed by the contractor and the owner. In such situation, the owner might refuse to pay the accelerating cost claiming that the contractor participated in the project delay. On the other hand, the contractor might argue that the owner caused delays were also participated in the total project delay.

Due to difficulties in analyzing the delay, most of the projects keep the issue of analyzing delay unsolved up by the end of the project. At that time, analyzing the delay becomes more difficult because of the difficulties in obtaining information from the project documents.

The most commonly used method is the Time Impact Analysis. All methods use the critical path except for the impacted as-planned method, which is mainly based on the as-planned baseline schedule.

SOURCE: AACE 29R-03 – FORENSIC SCHEDULE ANALYSIS

However, the time impact method will not be able to be used unless a proper programme has been prepared, accepted and updated.

It is rather surprising that most contracts, even standard form contracts, do not give instructions on what methodology to use although they handle the issue of time in detail.

Address the following issues:

• Delay on the project:  quantify it, evaluate its cause, and determine the overall effect on the total delay.

• Understand responsibilities: Excusable Compensable Delays caused by the owner, Excusable Noncompensable Delay caused by contractor or Nonexcusable Delay caused by contractor.

• Check float and total float allocation and critical path.

• Follow a systematic approach that can be programmed and combined with updating CPM schedule

• Check each contract.

Critical paths might change during the window time, thus changing the computation of project delay.

Also during the course of the project, actions of various project participants continually change floats of noncritical activities, and thus affect the resource allocation flexibility available to the construction firms.

Activity float is an asset, the equivalent of money, but the current methods do not take any account of this fact.

More information ↓

The value of a capital programme can be destroyed due to operational readiness failures (en)
O valor da prontidão operacional num programa de capital (pt)