Planning advice for contractors

Vocabulary transfers faster than machinery. A JCT team learns to say compensation event within a fortnight, then prices its first one like an extension of time application with the money to follow. There is no money to follow. The mechanism comparison in full: what triggers each, who assesses it, against what standard, and why the notice reflex has now flipped on both contracts.

Most JCT and NEC comparisons stop at philosophy: one allocates risk, the other encourages collaboration. Both true, and useless when the project manager has just rejected your programme. This is what actually changes when a team fluent in JCT runs an NEC job: the programme becomes a contractual instrument, extensions of time become compensation events on an eight-week clock, change is valued from Defined Cost rather than your rates, and early warnings acquire a price.

A compensation event quotation has two limbs, time and money, and the money is the one contractors price worst. This is the guide to the change to the Prices: how it is built from Defined Cost and the Fee under clause 63.1, why your tendered rates usually do not apply, where your overhead and profit actually sit, why the forecast you agree is final, and the handful of points where valid entitlement quietly leaks away in the pricing.

The notice says not accepted, and what happens next decides more than the fate of one submission. This playbook covers the moment in full: the four reasons Clause 31.3 permits and why they are the only four, the detail a notice must give you under Clause 13.4, the triage that sorts right from wrong from unclear, when withholding acceptance becomes a compensation event under 60.1(9), and the cost of drifting while the Accepted Programme goes stale.

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