Planning advice for contractors

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.

A PCSA, or pre-construction services agreement, pays a contractor for defined services before the main contract is awarded. Law firms cover its scope, fees and termination. This guide covers the contractor's obligations from the planner's side: the programme built under it, the standard forms from JCT and NEC4, Option X22, the three routes for that programme at contract award under NEC4, and what to write into the services schedule before signing.

NEC4 Option A and Option C both price the works in an activity schedule, and there the resemblance ends. One pays for completed activities and leaves the overrun with the Contractor. The other pays forecast Defined Cost plus the Fee and settles the risk through the share at Completion. This guide sets them side by side through the programme: what each pays, what each asks of the programme, how compensation events land and where each one goes wrong.

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.

Delay damages are the part of the JCT to NEC transition contractors think they already understand. The rate is in the contract data and it starts when you are late. What changes is not the arithmetic but the procedure: JCT surrounds the deduction with three notices a contractor can attack, and NEC removes all of them. Plus the conclusion most find backwards, that taking option X7 out of the contract raises exposure rather than lowering it.

Every contractor arriving on NEC has heard that NEC is strict about notices and JCT is relaxed. It is half wrong, in the half that costs money. JCT keeps two notices because it keeps two lists: the extension of time notice carries no sanction, while the loss and expense notice has been held by a court to be a condition of being paid at all. NEC runs one notification and one deadline, and it bars time and money together.