Planning advice for contractors

Hong Kong's edition of the NEC4 ECC keeps the standard compensation event procedure and changes much of what sits around it. Weather becomes a list of Observatory warnings, labour shortage becomes an event, and on government contracts several events pay time only while the Project Manager can take six weeks to reply. This guide sets each change against the standard form, explains actual cost on Options A and B, and shows how a disputed event reaches adjudication under Cap. 65

The contract is signed, the Scope or Specification says the programme goes in as Primavera P6, and the tender programme was built in MS Project. An export produces a file, not a programme the client's planner will accept. This guide covers where NEC4, JCT and FIDIC put the software requirement and the first programme's deadline, what an import from MS Project keeps and loses, whether to convert or rebuild, and how to set the P6 programme up for the contract.

The SCL Protocol lists six delay analysis methods and the commentary argues endlessly about which is best. The question is usually settled already. What your programme contains and what records survive decide which methods are open to you, and on an NEC contract clause 63.5 has prescribed one before the argument starts.

Under NEC4 the assessment date arrives whatever has been filed, and a month without an application is a month without an increase. This guide walks the payment clauses from the contractor's side: what the application must show on each main Option, the certificate and interest, pay less notices under Y(UK)2, how the programme controls the cash, and the clause 53 final assessment. With a two-page Payment Application Checklist.

The NEC4 contract read from the planning desk: how the ECC is put together, the main and secondary options in a table each and who does what. Then how time, money and change run back to the Accepted Programme, with one late access event worked through week by week.

In an NEC time dispute the lawyers argue entitlement, but much of what decides it sits in the programme record: which programme the contract recognised at each dividing date, what happened against it and what each event did to planned Completion. This guide sets out what counts as programme evidence under NEC4, what a planner adds to a claim, what changes in an adjudication timetable and where the evidence tends to fail.

Most of what changed between the 1999 and 2017 FIDIC conditions is a clause number. The problem is the templates that were never updated: on a 2017 contract, a notice citing Sub-Clause 8.4 for an extension of time is citing the advance warning provision instead.

NEC4 has six main options, and the one in the contract decides how the Contractor is paid, who carries an overrun and what the programme is asked to support. This guide takes them in pairs: the priced contracts A and B, the target contracts C and D, and the cost reimbursable contracts E and F. For each, what an assessment pays, where the cost risk sits, which clauses only that option carries, and what the planner has to keep current for the money to hold up.

Each NEC4 compensation event is assessed from one date. Clause 63.1 sets it, cost on one side of it is actual and on the other forecast, and clause 63.5 measures delay against the Accepted Programme current on it. This guide explains how the dividing date is set, what it decides, the dates it is confused with and how NEC3 differed, with a worked example in which two events with dividing dates nine days apart are assessed against different programmes.