A few years before, there was a project where I was asked to make a delay claim document. I was there as a Primavera P6 planner for guiding an electrical supplier who earlier had subcontracted the construction of many electrical buildings to a manufacturing yard.

The primary design engineer of the Primavera P6 project made dozens of fundamental design alterations in the beginning year of the venture. Contract and communication issues between my owner and the fabrication yard ended in a delay of more than a year from the actual contract date to the last delivery.

Matters got worse when there were no updates over the delay period. The only robust Primavera P6 schedules that I acquired were the as-built schedule and the original contract that I reformed when I got contacted for this project.

This was the first significant delay claim I had been engrossed in. I would like to highlight few examples which we dealt with. Don’t consider this as textbook examples to handle a delay claim with Primavera P6 but expectantly it will highlight specific eye-catching areas of this situation.

The Difficult Dare

My work began in less than ideal situations. My Primavera P6 project group had changed a lot, and only one person was from the original team since the start. The subcontractor wasn’t communicating with the client due to some payment issues.

The Primavera P6 schedule was not even updated according to the latest terms and norms. I had the initial plan for the project which I used as the project baseline. I utilized the as-built schedule as the present venture.

However, there was pressure on me from the project manager to outline a hypothetical baseline which shouldn’t match to the original Primavera P6 schedule.

The lack of proper documentation led to a month of confusion, and any detail did not help in creating a Primavera P6 schedule.

The construction process also got delayed for 2 months due to the late notices. I neatly spanned these time periods with a delay representing activity. The delay periods were shown as expenses of delays and demonstrated to the client as part of the claim along with the supporting Primavera P6 documentation.

Delay Claim

An Example Showing Schedule-

According to the above situations, we can see the following delays:

The book by O’Brian and Plotnick, titled – “CPM in Construction Management,” says there are two fundamental ways where a CPM schedule can affect a delay:

It makes up a base for the creative planning of the CPM schedule. And the more important part is that it can be used to evaluate actual claims by reconstructing the project’s history or by using an existing CPM plan for indicating changed effects in the Primavera P6 schedule.

A significant factor in introducing a convincing delay claim is the accuracy and quality of the project record maintenance. In this case, total errors in record keeping were damaging in the rebuilding of the project’s antiquity.

“Construction Project Scheduling and Control” by Saleh Mubarak identifies the number of frequent scheduling errors about delay claims. Following are the mistakes which I saw in my project:

Deleting the Baseline Footprint-

The previous Primavera P6 planner had modified the baseline schedule as per the work progress and did not save general baselines for the project record creation.

Luckily, there was a baseline that was provided at the beginning that I could remake to compare the original one with the actual as-built schedule. The gap of detail in between the start and finish points was harmful to the delay claim.

Setting Unrealistic Schedules-

The project team was handling the pressure of getting the contract signed, and the Primavera P6 baseline schedule was aggressive. The real cause of this being unrealistic plans which made the team members stand at fault.

Skipping Regular Updates-

The previous baselines were not saved, so it became hard to work correctly. Due to this, the project went off-track, and it was not easy to put every update regarding it in the Primavera P6 baseline schedule.

Lack of Perfect Documentation-

The project didn’t have proper updates on significant events in the Primavera P6. The essential minutes of meetings that were recorded had vast amounts of transmission of documents in between.

There wasn’t a schedule-specific record maintained which could help further. This file could have served in referencing both the document control system and minutes of meeting with firm evidence.

Primavera P6 has features of note taking and issue tracking capacity which is useful for adding data of project events that are tough to show on a Gantt chart.

Conclusion-

There must be a regularly updated project schedule of Primavera P6 so that the conflicts should be avoided in future.

The record keeping activity for any project is a must to claim a delay correctly.

The delay claim ended with a negotiation between the client and electrical supplier. The issues were solved by a committee of senior management.

The claim schedule had a major effect when disclosing the design of the project.

I thought sharing these details would be a great idea with the Primavera P6 users.

So, what are your comments on these?