Friday, October 02, 2020
We often talk about delays in construction. I have found that the discussions concerning delays are frequently really discussions about disruptions. Understanding the difference between these two terms may be of help in identifying impacts on a project and may help you and your project manager receive compensation for impacts to your project cause by others.
A delay is an event or series of events that take place on a project which causes the critical path schedule items to not be performed according to the agreed-upon schedule.
The important things to understand here are:
1. The critical path items
2. Not completing the critical path on schedule.
The critical path is something that is typically misunderstood, so let us start there. Definition of critical path: The longest sequence of activities in a project plan which must be completed on time for the project to complete on the final due date. Another way of stating this is, the Critical Path is the sequence of tasks that define the shortest completion period for the project.
Only a delay to a Critical Path task delays the project. One must keep in mind that in all large construction projects there are multiple paths or sequences of tasks that may be happening simultaneously. In other words. not every task to be performed on the project is dependent on another task competing first. Sometimes things can be done at the same time. In order to define the critical path, you have to schedule out all the activities on the project and you have to determine which tasks are dependent on other tasks and schedule everything out according to that logic. Once that is done, you need to identify the last task that must be completed on the project and then trace back along with all the tasks that are in the line or path leading up to that task. That line of tasks is the critical path of the project. If you use a program such as Project or Primavera to schedule out your tasks, the program will identify your critical path and you can print it out for fast reference. Even better, the General Contractor on most projects can provide you with a print out of the Critical Path for the project, if you ask for it. Which you should, because then we can analyze that critical path for ourselves.
Understanding the critical path is crucial because we can only ask for compensation for a delay if something happens, beyond our control, which causes a delay to a task in the critical path. The second reason this is so crucial is that, in most contracts, the only compensation you can get for a delay is additional time added to the schedule. In other words, most contracts prohibit compensation of money for delays.
Now let's talk about disruptions. In most conversations about "delays," I find that the parties are actually talking about disruptions. The definition of disruption is any event that takes place on a project which prevents any task from being completed on time AND/OR prevents the task from being completed with the efficiency which was reasonably expected at the time the bid and budget for the project were established. Please notice two very important distinctions here from the definition of a delay:
1. This applies to everything that is done on the project, not just the critical path items
2. This also applies to the completion of tasks with the planned efficiency and not limited to just not completing them on time.
A third and very important distinction is that, contractually, you are not limited to just schedule extensions for compensation for disruptions. You can reasonably ask for monetary compensation for disruptions.
I will use an example of disruption. We provide a bid for the electrical construction of a high-rise building. We establish a budget in the bid for the installation of the equipment in the electrical rooms on each floor. When we developed the budget, we had reasonably planned to make the installation of each electrical room equipment while the crews were working on each floor installing the branch circuitry components. The framer on the project completed framing on each floor during construction for everything except the electrical rooms because they were behind schedule. After they caught up, they returned and completed the framing of the electrical rooms. The project completed on time and each stage of the critical path of the project completed on time. By definition, there was no delay in the project due to how the framer completed their work. However; due to how they completed their work. we could not perform our work the way we had reasonably planned the work. We had to return with crews to floors that had been completed for everything else so that we could complete the electrical rooms. This caused us to do work out of sequence, it causes our supervision to be supervising crews on more floors than we had planned and it causes us to not be able to complete the work as efficiently as we had planned due to all of these things. In other words, our work was completed on time, but it cost us more money to complete it than we had reasonably planned for in our bid.
This example and things like it happen quite often on construction projects. When it does happen, we sometimes ignore it in the "interest of being a good partner", or we attempt to submit a change order for delay at the end of the project because we have determined that we are going over budget in certain areas. Neither approach is in the best interest of the company.
This example is a clear representation of three impacts that are recognized in the industry1. Dilution of Supervision2. Multiple Mobilizations3. Out of sequence Work
The industry recognizes that these impacts create inefficiencies and therefore additional costs. If we are not the cause of the inefficiencies, then we are not responsible for the costs of the inefficiencies. We can rightfully request to be compensated for these costs and we should do so.
Successfully receiving compensation for these types of disruptions requires us to do the following:
1. Understand your project schedule and your project plan and track it daily so that you know if you are on schedule and able to follow your plan.
2. Utilize your daily report in iAuditor and identify every item that caused a disruption to your work. Your project manager will receive these and then will be able to determine if a disruption change order is appropriate. They will also have the documentation to back up that change order.
3. Talk about disruptions that you are experiencing in coordination meetings and use a rapid observation report in iAuditor to make a quick note of that and send it to your project manager.
We have made the process of documenting these things very convenient for you by making it possible for you to use your smartphone and iAuditor to quickly identify and document this information and transmit it to your PM.
Please remember we have also provided you with an iAuditor template titled Change Order Cause and Impact Analysis that you can also use to report disruptions. This template has pull-down menus so that you can list a disruption and then it will ask you questions that you can answer with a click of a button that will provide your PM all of the information that they need to not only produce a good change order, but it will also calculate the percentage of inefficiency for them based on the standard industry tables.
Thank you and please feel free to call me with any questions concerning disruptions, delays or using iAuditor.
Ted "Smitty": Smith
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