When assessing the time impact of an NCE, and if both parties have agreed to use the actual delay as the basis for assessment, should Contractor delays be considered alongside PM contributed delays in the evaluation? For example if a critical piece of work was 4 days late, should you take into account that 2 days were say down to contractor resources not turning up and 2 days due to materials not being delivered, alongside say hitting an obstruction (PM’s liability) which the Contractor dealt with concurrently. In this scenario could you, as PM, argue that if the obstruction wasn’t encountered then the contractor would have been delayed anyway as his resources and materials did not turn up, thus no time awarded? Or should these contractor issues be ignored and should an assessment be made of what time was spent removing the obstruction only and what knock on impact this had critical path wise? Say maybe 2 days disruption (of the 4 days realised).
This is an area that the contract is not quite clear enough on for my liking. I believe the practical and contractual answer and the only one that would work in every eventuality is if you take into account progress and anything else that has happened since the last Accepted Programme and you until the time you were aware of the compensation event. I have written an article on “which programme to use when assessing a compensation event” of which the link is copied below.
In your example above, which ever event happened first should be the one that is assessed first, and then the subsequent event assessed afterwards.
Totally agree with Glenn’s comments and hopefully in any future revisions of the contract this issue will be addressed. As Glenn states it would be illogical to do anything other than to progress the programme.