Planning advice for contractors

FIDIC is the contract of EU-funded infrastructure, and the 2017 Edition decides extensions of time on the programme and the records behind it, not on the merits. On CEF-funded work those records also have to survive a funding audit. A guide for UK contractors moving into EU work and Baltic teams on funded jobs: what Sub-Clause 8.3 demands, how the 28-day and 84-day claim time bars work, and what an audit-ready FIDIC programme and claim actually contain.

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.

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.