Planning advice for contractors

Most NEC4 time impact assessments fail at the project manager's desk, not in the planning team. The analysis is usually sound. The structure is what fails. This article explains the five elements every accepted assessment contains: the dividing date with justification, the accepted programme with version, the compensation event fragnet built in isolation, the impacted programme with the calculation, and the narrative that walks the project manager through the cause and effect

Most contractors come to NEC with JCT instincts: claim extensions retrospectively, reconstruct delay at the end, argue from the completion date. NEC works the opposite way. Time entitlement is built prospectively, one compensation event at a time, against planned completion at the dividing date. Get that wrong, and you are fighting uphill for every week. Get it right, and the contract does the heavy lifting. This is the complete contractor guide to NEC delay analysis and exte

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.