Our experience demonstrates time-and-again that one of the greatest planning oversights by owners and their consultants is the failure to anticipate and to secure necessary owner’s protections in the contractor’s project schedule’s planning and maintenance. This hindsight comes clearly into focus when we receive service inquiries from distressed owners or their consultants whose projects have suffered significant delays and ownership has concluded the contractor has lost control of the project schedule.

In these instances, obstacles to address the contractor’s schedule deficiencies begin when our thorough analysis report examining the schedule’s constructability, level of detail, sequencing and collateral issues is presented to the contractor. Invariably, the contractor’s initial rebuttal rarely addresses schedule deficiencies but rather hinges on the parties executed agreement terms where schedule management has been unintuitively drafted as a one-way transaction in which the contractor submits its monthly schedule along with its pay application to the owner, but where the owner/CM has no contractual recourse to reject the schedule or to require the contractor to revise and resubmit. We know how to handle these situations and others to engender the contractor’s schedule realignment but contractual deficiencies play a part in getting to this juncture in the first place. If you’re thinking about recovery schedules contract clauses that instruct the contractor to resubmit its schedule should it publish a delay to the project’s completion beyond a designated contractual benchmark think again. We’ve seen schedule submissions that post unachievable earlier completion targets precisely to avoid such resubmissions and more commonly schedule delays that simply couldn’t be mitigated back inside the contractual benchmark with the contractor’s recovery efforts.