Planning advice for contractors

The client asks for a recovery plan. Somebody compresses the bars until the end date fits and issues it. That document is not a recovery plan, it is the same programme with less air in it, and everyone knows it within a fortnight.

FIDIC does not ask anyone to approve the programme. It asks the Engineer to review it, and gives a period in which to object. Let the period pass and a Notice of No-objection is deemed given, so the defined Programme exists whether anybody meant to create one or not. This guide covers what Sub-Clause 8.3 of the 2017 books requires, how the review works, and when and how the programme is revised.

Data cut-off on the 25th, report issued around the 5th, discussed mid-month. A decision taken on the 15th rests on information that was already three weeks old when it was read. Nobody is hiding anything. The loop is simply longer than the rate at which the job changes.

Most of the commentary on PPN 026 has led with the 20 per cent weighting. It is the wrong headline. What changed is that the menu is gone, and that on the larger contracts the commitment you write becomes a KPI somebody publishes and reports on every year.

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.

A FIDIC extension of time is decided on the programme and the records. This guide takes the 2017 Red and Yellow Books from the planner's side: the Sub-Clause 8.5 grounds and what each carries, the Notice of Claim and fully detailed Claim under 20.2 with the Engineer's 14 days and the late-submission review, the 42 plus 42 days under 3.7, concurrent delay, the programme evidence that wins the days, and what an EU grant adds on funded work.

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,

Hong Kong has now used the NEC form on more than 850 public works contracts and, since July 2023, has its own stand-alone edition of the ECC. The Hong Kong Edition re-engineers payment timing, compensation event assessment and dispute resolution, and every change lands on the programme. This is what the 2023 edition changes at programme level, where first submissions fail acceptance, and what a defensible programme contains.

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

Most contractors treat clause 31 as a procedural hurdle to clear at the start of the job. Submit the programme, wait for acceptance, move on. That approach quietly hands commercial control to the project manager. This article explains what the accepted programme actually protects, how the deemed acceptance mechanism works, and why a programme that was accepted at mobilisation provides almost no commercial protection by month six.

Time Risk Allowance and terminal float both create breathing space in an NEC programme. That is why contractors often confuse them. But they sit in different places, serve different purposes, and blurring the line between them weakens programme acceptance, distorts the update cycle, and makes compensation event assessments harder to defend. This article explains what each one actually is, how they connect without being the same, and why keeping the distinction clean matters c

A practical NEC3 vs NEC4 comparison focused on programme acceptance, treated acceptance, early warning discipline and CE integration, based on NEC’s “Next Generation” white paper.

The NEC4 compensation event time bar is the most asymmetric provision in the entire contract. Almost every other NEC provision creates a spectrum of outcomes through judgement, extension mechanisms, or proportionate consequences. The eight-week time bar creates a cliff: notifications inside the period preserve entitlement, notifications outside it forfeit it entirely. The contractor who understands this asymmetry organises their administration around it.

Every contractor running an NEC4 contract loses some compensation event entitlement that the contract would otherwise have delivered. The amount lost is not random. It is the predictable consequence of seven specific failure modes that recur across contractor types, contract sizes and sectors. Each is preventable through operational discipline.

Most contractors treat time risk allowances as a presentational question: how much contingency to show and how to stop the project manager challenging it. The framing misses what TRA actually is. A time risk allowance is the only risk provision in the programme the contract explicitly protects: it is retained when compensation events are assessed, while risk hidden inside padded durations is silently consumed by the impact arithmetic, event after event.

Give the same compensation event to two competent planners. Same accepted programme, same dividing date, same facts. One comes back with three weeks of delay to planned Completion. The other comes back with nine days. Both can defend their model. Neither has made an arithmetic error. The difference is five judgement calls that sit inside every NEC4 delay assessment, that the contract deliberately leaves open, and that most contractors make silently.