Planning advice for contractors

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.

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.

NEC requires mitigation but cannot impose acceleration. Most contractors confuse the two. Contractors who mitigate when they should be quoting for acceleration give away recovery work the contract entitles them to be paid for. Contractors who refuse to mitigate lose entitlement because the assessment assumes they would have mitigated anyway. This is the practical guide to understanding where the line sits and how to protect the commercial position on both sides of it.

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.

Clause 15 only works when early warnings trigger decisions and programme movement. Here’s a quantified register method and weekly rhythm you can run on real jobs.

A practical NEC3 vs NEC4 comparison focused on programme acceptance, treated acceptance, early warning discipline and CE integration, based on NEC’s “Next Generation” white paper.

Every subcontractor delay on an NEC4 project is two delays at once. The subcontract event runs on its own clock with its own notification requirements, evidence, and commercial outcomes. The head contract event runs on a parallel clock with its own clause 61.3 window, its own assessment, and its own clause 64 vulnerability. Most contractors run one of these processes diligently and the other partially or not at all.