When I Receive an EOT Submission, I Don't Start With the Narrative

An EOT submission arrives with a well-written narrative and a headline number. The narrative is where most reviews start. It is the last place I do.

The narrative is the contractor’s case, assembled to persuade. That does not make it wrong — but it means it is the argument, not the evidence. So I start with the things that are harder to shape.

The baseline it is measured against. Was it accepted? Is it realistic and logic-driven, or held together by constraints? If the starting line is contestable, the whole analysis is contestable — and I would rather know that first.

Delay-event mapping. I take each pleaded event and locate it: when did it occur, and what was the critical path at that moment? An event that hit a floated activity, or a path that was not driving completion, does not delay the job however painful it felt.

Affected milestones and critical-path impact. Which contractual milestone is actually threatened, and can the effect be demonstrated in the programme — a fragnet in the contemporaneous update — rather than asserted in a paragraph?

Cause, effect and evidence, together. Cause without a proven effect on completion is a bad week, not a claim. Effect without contemporaneous records is unprovable. I am looking for all three to stand up at once.

Net, not gross. The headline is usually the total slip. The entitlement is the Employer-risk, critical portion of it, net of the contractor’s own delay — and the gap between those two numbers is often the entire review.

Only once I have done all that do I read the narrative properly — now as a map to test against the evidence, rather than a conclusion to accept. Where it matches the programme and the records, it is persuasive. Where it does not, I have found exactly the question the submission has to answer.

Start with what is demonstrable. The story is easy to write; the evidence is what decides it.