On a recent trip to Hawaii, one of our clients brought a problem to our attention that we’ve heard numerous times before. Their original one-year contract term had grown to eighteen months (and counting). With 80+ approved change orders, the contract price had increased by more than fifty per cent. All in all that sounds like a good job, right? Wrong, because there’s a catch – the Owner is insisting that all the changes are “concurrent”, and that no additional compensation for extended general conditions is forthcoming. We’ve seen this time and time again, and the most effective tool to achieve contractual time extension is a good schedule, along timely documentation. Without either one of these components, the contractor is in a weaker position to collect what’s fairly due.
A good schedule includes:
- an approved baseline
- recent updates
- schedule entries for each significant change which affects time, (per the attached TIA doc)
A US Army Corps of Engineers scheduling seminar in Anchorage provided the best “how to” document I’ve ever seen, attached here. It’s a litigation-tested-and-proven method, to get your company the time extension justified by the project. Simply follow the steps in the linked pdf file, and you’ll have much better success. Thanks to Craig Lance, of USACE Alaska for permission to share this excellent slide deck. Do yourself and your company a big favor, and avoid the headache and expense of hiring us to build a forensic Claim Schedule, by doing this on a monthly basis. Happy Scheduling!
