Planning advice for contractors

The SCL Protocol lists six delay analysis methods and the commentary argues endlessly about which is best. The question is usually settled already. What your programme contains and what records survive decide which methods are open to you, and on an NEC contract clause 63.5 has prescribed one before the argument starts.

The NEC4 contract read from the planning desk: how the ECC is put together, the main and secondary options in a table each and who does what. Then how time, money and change run back to the Accepted Programme, with one late access event worked through week by week.

In an NEC time dispute the lawyers argue entitlement, but much of what decides it sits in the programme record: which programme the contract recognised at each dividing date, what happened against it and what each event did to planned Completion. This guide sets out what counts as programme evidence under NEC4, what a planner adds to a claim, what changes in an adjudication timetable and where the evidence tends to fail.

Most of what changed between the 1999 and 2017 FIDIC conditions is a clause number. The problem is the templates that were never updated: on a 2017 contract, a notice citing Sub-Clause 8.4 for an extension of time is citing the advance warning provision instead.

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.

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.

JCT vs NEC vs FIDIC, from the planner's side. The three contracts use the same words, programme, notice and extension of time, and give each a different job. This guide sets them side by side, follows one late-access event through each week by week, reads three court cases with the programme at their centre, and sets out how I run the programme when a job moves between them.

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.

In June 2026 the High Court refused to enforce a £1.65m NEC adjudication award in Premier Modular v Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. The legal headline is natural justice. The lesson for contractors is a project controls one. The whole dispute turned on which programme was the Accepted Programme, and the date the claim relied on was never in it. Under NEC, a compensation event is only as good as the Accepted Programme it stands on, and acceptance is a status you earn,

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

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

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

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.

Defined Cost is how NEC4 measures what the work cost the Contractor, and on Options C to F it is also how the Contractor is paid. This guide sets out what it includes under each main Option, what Disallowed Cost takes out, how the Fee is added and how one compensation event is valued, with a worked example. It then shows why real cost still goes unrecovered when the programme and the cost record stop telling the same story.

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.