Planning advice for contractors

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.

The JCT Standard Building Contract asks for a master programme under clause 2.9, leaves critical paths optional in the Contract Particulars, and only requires an update when you apply for an extension of time. The Design and Build form does not expressly require a programme at all. None of that changes what a retrospective claim has to prove. This is the gap between the contractual floor and the evidential bar, and what to keep so the claim stands up.

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.

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

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.

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.

For mechanical, electrical, civil, groundworks and fit-out contractors, the accepted programme often only becomes important when change or delay lands on a programme that no longer reflects the live job. This article explains why that drift matters under NEC and how programme protection is often lost by degrees, not all at once.

Many specialist subcontractors run NEC packages without a full planning team. The issue is not team size. It is whether the programme stays live, current and commercially usable while the job is moving.

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

Clause 15 only works when early warnings trigger decisions and programme movement. Here’s a quantified register method and weekly rhythm you can run on real jobs.

There is a four-to-twelve-week window between contract award and site mobilisation that the contractor's commercial outturn depends on more than any other stage of delivery. It is unremarkable in most calendars and rarely discussed at board level. Yet what gets set up during this window will determine, more than any subsequent decision, whether the project's commercial position is defensible at month eighteen. Pre-construction is not preparation.

Excel is not a planning tool. It is a calculation tool with planning-shaped output. NEC contracts are built on logic recalculation. The seven recurring pitfalls of Excel programmes on NEC projects are not seven separate problems with seven separate fixes. They are seven symptoms of one structural mismatch between the category of tool and the category of contract. This is the complete analysis: why Excel cannot perform the contractual functions.

There was a time when a construction programme could survive as a polite fiction. That time is ending. In modern UK construction, the programme has quietly become the document that reveals whether a contractor is genuinely managing time or simply explaining it after the event. The dividing line is no longer between firms with newer software and firms with older software. It is between firms that maintain a believable live time position and firms that periodically reconstruct

A UK Tier 2 contractor with a strong NEC track record won its first major FIDIC contract and was in dispute eighteen months later. A UK contractor with extensive FIDIC experience won an NEC4 contract and had the project manager invoking clause 64 within six months. Both failures had the same underlying cause: contractors who switch between NEC and FIDIC without recognising that the two contracts reward fundamentally different organisational capabilities.

A contractor seven months into a £35 million NEC4 contract is financing £4.2 million of working capital. The work is on programme. The technical performance is sound. The cashflow position is not. Three teams diagnose three different causes and none of them identifies what is actually happening.

UK adjudication data records 2,264 referrals between May 2023 and April 2024, with inadequate contract administration identified as the leading cause of disputes at 50 per cent of cases. Behind that figure sits a pattern most experienced commercial directors recognise. Contractors with weak NEC4 programme compliance lose disproportionately on change assessment, on delay narratives, on cashflow timing, and on tender evaluation. The losses are not random.

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.