Planning advice for contractors

The contract is signed, the Scope or Specification says the programme goes in as Primavera P6, and the tender programme was built in MS Project. An export produces a file, not a programme the client's planner will accept. This guide covers where NEC4, JCT and FIDIC put the software requirement and the first programme's deadline, what an import from MS Project keeps and loses, whether to convert or rebuild, and how to set the P6 programme up for the contract.

Under NEC4 the assessment date arrives whatever has been filed, and a month without an application is a month without an increase. This guide walks the payment clauses from the contractor's side: what the application must show on each main Option, the certificate and interest, pay less notices under Y(UK)2, how the programme controls the cash, and the clause 53 final assessment. With a two-page Payment Application Checklist.

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.

NEC4 has six main options, and the one in the contract decides how the Contractor is paid, who carries an overrun and what the programme is asked to support. This guide takes them in pairs: the priced contracts A and B, the target contracts C and D, and the cost reimbursable contracts E and F. For each, what an assessment pays, where the cost risk sits, which clauses only that option carries, and what the planner has to keep current for the money to hold up.

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.

NEC4 Option A and Option C both price the works in an activity schedule, and there the resemblance ends. One pays for completed activities and leaves the overrun with the Contractor. The other pays forecast Defined Cost plus the Fee and settles the risk through the share at Completion. This guide sets them side by side through the programme: what each pays, what each asks of the programme, how compensation events land and where each one goes wrong.

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.

A FIDIC extension of time is decided on the programme and the records. This guide takes the 2017 Red and Yellow Books from the planner's side: the Sub-Clause 8.5 grounds and what each carries, the Notice of Claim and fully detailed Claim under 20.2 with the Engineer's 14 days and the late-submission review, the 42 plus 42 days under 3.7, concurrent delay, the programme evidence that wins the days, and what an EU grant adds on funded work.

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

Primavera P6 is the industry-standard scheduling tool on major UK construction projects. It is also an opinionated one. Its defaults were shaped by contracts that work very differently from NEC, and a P6 schedule built to generic best practice will usually look fine on the surface and fail at the moments that matter most. This is the complete contractor guide to Primavera P6 for NEC programmes.

The programme schedule goes to the planner. The programme narrative goes to the decision-maker. Most contractors write one that describes the Gantt rather than argues the case. Here is why that costs them at clarification and what a strong narrative actually does.

Excel is not a planning tool. It is a calculation tool with planning-shaped output. NEC contracts are built on logic recalculation. The seven recurring pitfalls of Excel programmes on NEC projects are not seven separate problems with seven separate fixes. They are seven symptoms of one structural mismatch between the category of tool and the category of contract. This is the complete analysis: why Excel cannot perform the contractual functions.

NEC did not arrive fully formed. It evolved as a deliberate response to the failures of the contracts that preceded it, and every clause in the current NEC4 suite carries the imprint of a specific problem that JCT and ICE could not solve. The history is not background to contemporary NEC practice. It is the explanation of why the controls matter, what the contract was designed to prevent, and how contractors who understand the evolution administer the contract more effectivel

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.

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.