By Steve Rizer
“If an owner never addressed schedule updates during a construction project, what would be the best method to determine the impact of delays at the end of the project?” This was one of almost a dozen questions that various professionals from within the construction community asked during the “Q&A” segment of “Forensic Schedule Analysis: Examples and Case Studies,” a 90-minute webinar that WPL Publishing held last month.
Webinar speaker and Trauner Consulting Services Director Mark Nagata prefaced his answer by telling the webinar attendee, “When you say, ‘addressed updates,’ I’m going to assume that what you mean is that the contractor submitted them but the owner never looked at them.” In making this assumption, Nagata referenced a project in which the contractor submitted a baseline schedule, got it approved, submitted updates, and the owner “looked at” those updates but never approved them, “which, in my mind, is very similar to not addressing updates.”
Nagata then commented, “I think as long as the contractor can show that the updates represented his or her plan for completion, they should be able to use those to identify impacting the project.”
In answering the question, Nagata told the webinar attendee that if there are no schedule updates on a project, “you then have to look at possibly other techniques” aside from the contemporaneous analysis method. “You might have to look at the as-planned versus as-built approach.”
Nagata cautioned owners to “be careful” of situations in which updates are not reviewed or go unanswered. Such non-actions have the potential to be interpreted as implicitly accepting the schedules, he said.
Also during the webinar, Nagata discussed Critical Path Method scheduling, taxonomy associated with AACE International’s “Recommended Practice for Forensic Schedule Analysis,” a “real-life” case study of contemporaneous analysis, concurrent delay, and contract provisions and legal precedent.
To purchase a recording of the webinar, visit http://constructionpronet.com/Products/Forensic-Schedule-Analysis.aspx.
