Planning advice for contractors

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

Most construction delivery teams still rely on fragmented spreadsheets, scattered emails and static PDF reports that take hours to compile and rarely tell the full story. The Contractor Performance Dashboard consolidates everything a Project Manager, Planner, QS or Site Manager needs into one coherent view: live SPI tracking, plan-versus-actual S-curves, structured obstacle logs, work-pack variance, four-week lookahead and compensation event evidence.

FIDIC vs NEC is not about which contract is better. NEC tests a contractor's programme dialogue, FIDIC its contemporary records. This guide compares the FIDIC 2017 Red Book and NEC4 clause by clause on programme review, revisions, warnings, notices, delay assessment and delay damages, with JCT alongside, and shows where contractors moving between the two forms go wrong.

Social value in construction is the benefit a contractor commits to deliver through a contract, scored at tender and monitored through delivery. This guide covers the law and policy behind it, what scores under PPN 026 from January 2027, why commitments fail, and how jobs and skills commitments are delivered and evidenced on a live project, from the roles in the programme to the records each KPI assessment asks for.

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.

NEC contract administration today still works the way it worked in 1993. A programme gets submitted as a document. The project manager reviews it as a document. Acceptance is recorded as a document. The contractual machinery is electronic in form and paper in function. This is changing faster than most contractors have absorbed, and not in the way the industry talks about.

An NEC job won, the first programme due and the planning seat empty. This guide compares four ways to cover the seat, shows the weekly lookahead, obstacle list and monthly report that remote NEC planning support delivers, and says plainly when a full-time planner is the better choice.

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.

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.