On large NEC4 jobs the risk that costs most is rarely technical. It is slow leakage: events notified late, programmes not revised, allowances buried in durations. 3 gates a Project Director can hold.
Gate 1: a baseline you can defend
- Know who owns the float. Delay to the Completion Date is measured from planned Completion (63.5), so float inside the programme absorbs a compensation event’s delay first. Terminal float, between planned Completion and the Completion Date, stays with the Contractor.
- Watch the near-critical paths. The secondary chain with 5 days of float is the one that turns critical while everyone watches the main path.
- Resource the programme from the market you actually have. A programme built on labour you can’t get doesn’t represent the Contractor’s plans realistically, and 31.3 lets the Project Manager reject it for that.
Gate 2: notification discipline
- Early warnings at the first sign (15.1).
- Compensation events notified within 8 weeks (61.3). Miss that and time and money are lost, unless the event came from a Project Manager or Supervisor instruction.
- No agreeing to agree later. Where the effects are too uncertain to forecast, the Project Manager states assumptions in the instruction to quote (61.6), and a later correction is itself a compensation event (60.1(17)).
- Site records that give the cause of each delay at the time, tied to the event it belongs to.
Gate 3: numbers on risk
- Run a schedule risk analysis and set the budget and programme at P80, with the deterministic date as the floor.
- Price risk into quotations. The assessment of a compensation event includes risk allowances for matters with a significant chance of occurring that are not compensation events (63.8). Leave them out and you give money away.
- Look for chain risks: a late technical acceptance that stands a gang down and pushes a possession or an outage.
Stepping in early
Look at 3-month rolling productivity rather than last month’s snapshot. A trend shows while there is still time to act on it.
VERTX gives director-led review of programmes, notices and risk on live jobs.
Talk it through with the director: info@vertxprojectcontrols.co.uk, or book a consultation.
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