Planning advice for contractors

FIDIC is the contract of EU-funded infrastructure, and the 2017 Edition decides extensions of time on the programme and the records behind it, not on the merits. On CEF-funded work those records also have to survive a funding audit. A guide for UK contractors moving into EU work and Baltic teams on funded jobs: what Sub-Clause 8.3 demands, how the 28-day and 84-day claim time bars work, and what an audit-ready FIDIC programme and claim actually contain.

In June 2026 the High Court refused to enforce a £1.65m NEC adjudication award in Premier Modular v Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. The legal headline is natural justice. The lesson for contractors is a project controls one. The whole dispute turned on which programme was the Accepted Programme, and the date the claim relied on was never in it. Under NEC, a compensation event is only as good as the Accepted Programme it stands on, and acceptance is a status you earn,

Most contractors prepare NEC programmes for submission. The strongest contractors prepare them for review. The difference is whether the planning team knows what the project manager actually checks, in what order, and what triggers rejection at each step. This article walks through the review sequence as the project manager experiences it: the first thirty seconds, the structural integrity pass, the clause 31.2 information check, the realism test, and the scope compliance che

Most NEC4 time impact assessments fail at the project manager's desk, not in the planning team. The analysis is usually sound. The structure is what fails. This article explains the five elements every accepted assessment contains: the dividing date with justification, the accepted programme with version, the compensation event fragnet built in isolation, the impacted programme with the calculation, and the narrative that walks the project manager through the cause and effect

NEC requires mitigation but cannot impose acceleration. Most contractors confuse the two. Contractors who mitigate when they should be quoting for acceleration give away recovery work the contract entitles them to be paid for. Contractors who refuse to mitigate lose entitlement because the assessment assumes they would have mitigated anyway. This is the practical guide to understanding where the line sits and how to protect the commercial position on both sides of it.

A programme that has lost integrity does not announce itself. It looks exactly like one that works. The problems only surface when a compensation event tests it and the programme cannot answer the one question the NEC contract keeps asking. This article describes five signs any project director can check in ten minutes, without specialist planning knowledge, to know whether the programme is protecting their commercial position or quietly giving it away.

Most contractors submit programme revisions that update progress, move the data date forward, and miss everything else clause 32 requires. The project manager receives a schedule that shows where the job is but not what the contractor is doing about it. That is not a revision. It is a progress snapshot. This article explains what a clause 32 programme revision actually needs to contain, why most revisions are rejected, and what to do when the project manager is deliberately a

Primavera P6 is the industry-standard scheduling tool on major UK construction projects. It is also an opinionated one. Its defaults were shaped by contracts that work very differently from NEC, and a P6 schedule built to generic best practice will usually look fine on the surface and fail at the moments that matter most. This is the complete contractor guide to Primavera P6 for NEC programmes.