426 Days Reduced to 91

01 — The Position

A contractor extension-of-time position of 426 days to final completion, built from 15 delay events spanning design, procurement and construction. Taken at face value it would have moved the completion milestone by well over a year and reset the delay-damages position along with it. The task was not to negotiate that number downward but to test it — event by event, against the contract and against the programme actually driving completion — as the Engineer’s assessment of the claim on the Employer’s behalf.

02 — The Evidence

The approved baseline, every contemporaneous programme update at its data date, the instruction and variation record, and the correspondence fixing when each event was notified and when it was resolved. Entitlement was tested against that contemporaneous record — what the programme actually showed at the time, update by update — not against a single as-planned-impacted model built after the event. Confidential project records limit the level of detail that can be published; what follows is the method, not the parties or the figures behind it.

03 — The Programme Analysis

A windowed, longest-path analysis. The programme was sliced into nine windows, each opening at an approved baseline or a contemporaneous update and closing at the next data date, so the path driving completion could be identified as it stood in that window rather than assumed constant across the job. Slippage and recovery were measured window by window, and the driving path was tracked as it migrated between design, procurement and construction.

04 — Event Mapping

Every event was first screened for contractual validity, then located in the window in which it arose and decomposed along the chain that actually delivered each work package — request for proposal, recommendation, instruction, award, detailed design, fabrication, delivery, construction. Breaking each event into that chain made it possible to see which link had actually slipped, and whose risk that link was, before a single day was attributed to completion.

05 — Cause & Effect

Several events failed the validity screen outright — including one where the contractor claimed time to correct logic it had itself omitted from the approved baseline; sub-events where the governing instruction expressly directed the contractor to hold to baseline durations, so the claimed “additional” time had no contractual footing; and events where no proper notice had been given under the conditions of contract. The events that survived were then apportioned link by link along the delivery chain: slippage in the contractor’s own procurement steps stayed with the contractor, and the time it later recovered was credited back, while genuine Employer-risk delay in instructions and design approvals was isolated on its own. Only after that apportionment was any event tested for a demonstrable effect on completion.

06 — Critical Path

In several windows the longest path ran through the contractor’s own procurement and construction sequence, not through any Employer act. Employer-risk delay that was real but sat off the driving path in its window earned nothing — non-critical delay does not move completion, however large it looks on paper. The critical path was followed as it migrated window to window, and only delay that sat on it, in the window where it actually bit, was carried forward.

07 — Entitlement / Assessment

Three filters had now been applied in sequence — contractual validity, then causation and apportionment, then criticality. What survived all three was a small number of Employer-risk instruction and design events that were valid under the contract, Employer-caused in fact, and sitting on the path driving completion in the window where they arose — not the fifteen the headline claim rested on. Their net critical effect on the completion milestone was what could properly be assessed as entitlement.

08 — The Decision

91 days. The Employer-risk delay that was valid under the contract, Employer-caused in fact, and critical to completion — assessed on the longest path, window by window. The 335 days between the claim and the assessment were not argued away; they were accounted for, event by event, as contractor-risk, off the driving path, or contractually invalid.

09 — The Outcome

The position settled at 91 days on the evidence. Because every rejected day was tied to a specific, contemporaneously-recorded reason — the contractor’s own risk, off the driving path, or invalid under the contract — the assessment stood up line by line rather than as a single negotiated figure. A claim reduced this way holds because it can be walked back through the same record that built it.

10 — Director’s Lesson

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Case study → method → evidence → decision: Forensic Delay Analysis · Critical Path Stability · Field note: what negative float tells me · Director’s Playbook. See the decision framework behind it in My Approach.