NEC programme control guides

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.

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.

Many programmes now arrive with DCMA scorecards attached or come back with them in the reply. This guide reads all fourteen checks against the four reasons clause 31.3 gives for not accepting an NEC4 programme, explains why a score alone is not one of them, shows how to run the checks in Primavera P6 and how the Scope can make them contractual. It comes with a DCMA 14-point checklist to download.

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.

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.

Most contracts ask for a programme of works, and many of the ones that reach a client are bars drawn without logic. This guide sets out what a construction programme must show, the types a project runs through from tender to as-built, how to read one in six checks, and what JCT, NEC4 and FIDIC ask of it, with a fixed price for having yours built in P6.

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.

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.

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.