Criticism of the ASCE Schedule Delay Analysis Offsetting Delay Concept

At the recent 2018 AACE International Conference and Expo, Mark Nagata presented his paper criticizing the ASCE Schedule Delay Analysis’s offsetting delay concept. The paper’s abstract is below.

Abstract

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) published its Schedule Delay Analysis Standard in August 2017. Not as ambitious as AACE’s Recommended Practice for Forensic Schedule Analysis, ASCE’s Standard is largely composed of concepts pioneered, proven, and standardized by others. However, the Standard includes an unproven concept – offsetting delay. Offsetting delay is controversial, both, because it is unproven and, because it is biased towards the interests of contractors.

The concept of offsetting delay states that an owner may be required to grant the contractor a time extension for an owner-caused, non-critical-path delay at any point during the project. This aspect of the concept modifies what has long been one of the basic laws of time extensions – the contractor is only entitled to a time extension to the project completion date when an excusable delay delays the project’s critical path and forecast completion date.

The ASCE’s concept of offsetting delay is biased against the interests of the owner because it provides a time extension for non-critical-path delays to contractors, but does not provide relief to the owner from the contractor’s delay costs in identical circumstances. This paper evaluates the issues of criticality, concurrency, the redefinition of key terms, and other aspects of the ASCE Schedule Delay Analysis Standard’s offsetting delay concept in arguing for its removal from the standard.

Please

16 Things You Need To Document On Your Construction Daily Reports

Over time, we have developed a list of 16 items that should be documented consistently on every daily report. We are going to discuss each, but a good tip is to pull out your company’s daily report template and compare it to our list. Every company should have a daily report template and it should be used consistently across all of your projects.

Furthermore, to get all the information you want on your daily report, make sure your report asks for it. If necessary, modify your report template to include a section of all 16 areas that we are about to discuss.

Even before we get to our first item, and although this is obvious, the report must be dated and we also recommend including the day of the week as well. We see many reports that are incorrectly dated. Having the day of the week identified can help sort out which date the report was truly recorded on.

Item 1: Weather

Our first item that should be included is the weather. You want a complete weather report for the day. Was it sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowing? What were the temperatures morning, noon, and at the end of the day? How did the weather change throughout the day?

Item 2: The Location of Work On Site

Who was working and where were they working? Location can be defined by sectors on the plans, column lines, or using north, south, east, or west directions.

Item 3: Work Accomplished

Who is performing what scope? In this section, it is

Incorporating Weather Days into Your Project’s CPM Schedule

An often-debated question is “How should a project schedule incorporate the workdays that might be lost to adverse weather?”

While there is not one perfect solution for all projects, there are at least three approaches to incorporating weather into your CPM schedule. These approaches are:

(Of course, there is always a fourth option, which is to assume that every day lost to weather will be made up by working on Saturdays or by working overtime. If this is the assumption upon which both your costs and your schedule are based, and both your contract and your other team members are on board, then you may not have to bake any weather into your schedule at all.)

Each of these three options (except the one in which you do nothing to the schedule) will be discussed in more detail below.

1. Incorporating Adverse Weather Workdays in Work Calendars

In CPM scheduling software packages, users have to create or modify work calendars that identify when the contractor plans to work. For example, the most common work calendar is an 8-hour-per-day, 5-day workweek calendar that includes holidays and weekends as non-workdays. Each schedule activity is assigned to the work

What If The General Contractor Wants To Scrap The Baseline Schedule?

In our questions and answers series, we’ll answer some common questions that we receive from readers of our Ideas & Insights section. Here’s the first question.

Question:

Let’s say a General Contractor is weeks behind schedule on a 12-month project and has replaced the Site Superintendent and Project Executive. The new Project Executive would like to scrap the baseline and start anew. If the owner were to entertain this suggestion to develop a new schedule, what would be some things we would likely need to have clear before proceeding? If the revised schedule is approved, would this mean the owner has inadvertently provided a time extension and therefore could not assess liquidation damages?

Answer:

The first piece of good news here is the contract has gotten rid of the Project Executive and Site Superintendent that weren’t performing. And the new Project Executive sees the schedule as an important management tool. The schedule is a management tool. If it doesn’t reflect the contractor’s plan to complete the work, it’s useless. If the Project Executive wants to update the schedule so that it reflects his (or her) plan for completing the project, then I think you should be supportive of this effort, particularly if the contract completion date has already passed. By the way, it is common for contractors that have fallen behind schedule to revise the schedule for completion of the work. These are often called revised, recovery, or completion schedules.

Here are some of the things you need to be careful about:

Prescriptive vs. Performance Specifications in Construction

Today’s Ideas & Insights is about two different ways to write specifications: prescriptive and performance. I’ll tell you about them, why they are different, and what you should consider before choosing them.

Prescriptive Specifications

The first one, which we are very used to using in the design-bid-build world, is what we call prescriptive specifications. If you were to look at a standard highway construction contract, you would see the owner sometimes even telling the contractor what pieces of equipment to use and how to use them.

Prescriptive specifications are recipes: do this, then do this, then do this, etc. If you do all those things, you know we will accept whatever the results are. That can be a successful way to specify work on a design-bid-build project. It has been used for centuries. But it doesn’t fit very well within the design-build process, where you are not entirely certain exactly what you’ll be getting.

Performance Specifications

The kinds of specifications that might fit a little bit better with design-build projects are what we would call performance specifications. These specifications aren’t recipes. They don’t tell the contractor how to do the work. What they tell the contractor is what we want.

For example, a prescriptive specification would tell the contractor exactly what size motor we want to drive the vacuum cleaner. In contrast, a performance specification would tell them what kind of suction we want at the other end. Then, it’s the design-builder’s decision as to how to size the motor to meet our performance objectives.

The Challenge

Design-Build: Why Not?

In the last Ideas & Insights, we discussed the advantages of design-build. But there are things to consider when thinking about adopting design-build. We can call these disadvantages or challenges.

Limited Competition

One of the challenges, particularly for public agencies, is there may be a limit on the competition that you can get from local firms on design-build projects. However, as design-build becomes more popular, there are going to be more teams capable of executing a project on a design-build basis.

Your Risks and Role are Different

Another important consideration is that the risks can look very different. If you are used to your designer being the owner’s advocate on a construction project, then what you are going to find, in the design-build scenario, is that’s definitely not the case.

Here’s a quick example. I have a good client and friend who was involved with the construction of a public hospital using design-build. His inspectors noted that a component of the project was not being constructed as required by the specifications. In other words, the standards were not as set forth in the specifications. Dutifully, the inspectors identified the deficiency and made the owner’s representative aware of the problem.

The owner contacted the design-builder and said, “Look, we’ve got an issue out in the field. The contractor isn’t executing the project according to the specifications. We are going to reject it and we thought you should know.”

A quick response came back from the design-build entity. It basically said, “Yeah, we went out and took a look

How Could Owners Benefit from Design-Build Construction?

There are several perceived advantages to using design-build. In this Ideas & Insights, I want to look at those potential advantages from the perspective of the owner. Even if you are a contractor, I think it’s important, when discussing design-build, to consider the owner’s perspective.

Single Point of Responsibility

One of the most basic advantages is that the owner enjoys a single point of responsibility for both design and construction. Ultimately, this could limit the owner’s exposure to errors and omissions. That design-build team is responsible for both the design and the construction. If there are any errors or omissions in that design, it becomes the responsibility of the design-build entity. The owner would often stand between the designer and the contractor in the design-bid-build approach.

Accelerated Delivery

You can get accelerated project delivery results. One of the reasons for this is you can “fast track” the design and construction (meaning you can design at the same time you are constructing the facility). This is of course phased or staged. For example, the design of the foundations precedes the design of the building superstructure; which precedes the design of the guts of the building. Once the design for the foundations is completed, it can go out to bid and construction of the foundations can begin before the design of the superstructure or the guts of the building is completed. This is possible in the design-build process because the designer and the contractor are one

The Pitfalls of a New Schedule Delay Analysis Standard, Getting Paid for Changes, and Publication of the Third Edition of Construction Delays

Usually, our Ideas & Insights provide information on a single topic that helps you avoid, evaluate, or deal with problems on your construction projects.

Instead of focusing on one particular topic, in this Idea & Insight posting we’ve provided three new resources that we hope you find helpful.

How ASCE’s New Schedule Delay Analysis Standard May Impact Owners

One trend in the construction industry is the attempt to define delay analysis guidelines by professional organizations. Engineering News Record recently published a viewpoint by Mark Nagata that looks at a major flaw in the American Society of Civil Engineer’s new Schedule Delay Analysis Standard. The article discusses why this standard is unfair to owners.

Click the following link to read the full viewpoint: https://www.enr.com/articles/43115-the-flaw-in-asces-new-project-delay-guidelines

How Subcontractors Can Get Paid for Changes and Claims

Subcontractors sometimes struggle with compiling the necessary documentation that they need to make their change orders and claims submissions complete and, most importantly, successful. Bill Haydt provided some subcontractor-specific advice on eSub’s blog.

Click the following link to read the entire article: https://esub.com/getting-paid-changes-claims-take/

Construction Delays, Third Edition, Recently Published

Ted Trauner wrote the first edition of Construction Delays in 1990. In the following decades, the analysis of delays on construction project has become a common and more sophisticated practice.

Mark Nagata, Bill Manginelli, Scott Lowe, and Ted Trauner spent over a year revising and adding new sections to this third edition of Construction Delays. The newly released third edition is not just an update of the prior two publications, it provides practitioners with everything they need to know

How Retained Logic, Actual Dates, And Progress Override Deal With Out-Of-Sequence Progress

In this Ideas & Insights, we’re going to look at an issue that may arise when you are either preparing or reviewing a schedule update. In particular, we’re going to look at how your scheduling software may address “out-of-sequence” progress.

In construction scheduling, “out-of-sequence” progress occurs when activities begin, progress, and finish earlier than expected (based on the logic and activity durations in the latest schedule).

Oracle’s Primavera P6 Project Management (P6) scheduling software provides users with three different options with which to handle out-of-sequence progress. The Retained Logic and Progress Override options are carry overs from P3. However, there appears to be a significant amount of confusion among schedulers and construction professionals as to how the third option (Actual Dates) deals with out-of-sequence progress. Let’s look at how each of the three options deal with out-of-sequence progress in different situations.

To show how these scheduling options work, Figure 1 depicts a simple, four-activity schedule. The activities are connected to one another with Finish-to-Start relationships in sequence. Figure 1 illustrates how P6’s Retained Logic and Progress Override options deal with out-of-sequence when an activity begins earlier than expected and makes progress.

Figure 1.

In Figure 1, the blue bars represent completed work, the red bars represent critical path work, and the green bars represent remaining work that is not critical. The dates identified in the schedule calendar correspond to the dates

What Management Structure Should You Put In Place On A Typical Construction Project?

In our questions and answers series, we answer some common questions that get sent to us from Ideas & Insights readers.

Question:

What management structure should I put in place on a typical construction project to handle communication issues?

Answer:

Communication Flow

The focus of all communication is typically the project manager. The project manager is the person responsible for the project. On small projects, one project manager might have several projects and handle all the communications on all of these projects.

On larger projects, the project manager might be responsible for one project and might handle all the communications on that project. On very large projects, there might be a Project Executive, a Project Manager, an Assistant Project Manager, and Superintendent (or more).

Each would have specific responsibilities regarding communication. For example, Superintendents would traditionally communicate with other Superintendents, non-working foremen, and other folks in the field.

Project Executives might communicate primarily with the client and then only on matters that relate to the agreements between the parties.

Project Managers will typically run meetings and prepare or direct the preparation of minutes. Others may draft letters, but all letters will typically go out with the signature of the PM.

Emails and Texts

E-mails and texts might be sent by anybody, but should be governed by protocols developed internally and on the project. The person responsible for responding should be clearly identified to minimize confusion and duplication of effort.

Schedules, RFIs, and Daily Logs

Schedules are usually prepared by the scheduler, the Project Engineer, or the Project Manager. However, every schedule should be