Most contract agreements for capital construction projects require that the contractor must make reasonable efforts not to unduly increase the damages of a project owner associated with project delays. However, it is also understood that the contractor does not have to actually be successful in the proposed mitigation efforts.
Delay Mitigation is a contractor’s efforts to reduce the effect of delays already incurred or anticipated to occur to activities or groups of activities. Delay mitigation is generally achieved through non-compensable efforts. These efforts are usually associated with changes in preferential schedule logic to perform the work in a shorter time frame, re-sequencing of the works wherever possible and without increasing the resources and manpower, improving procurement of delayed items and equipment, among others. Delay mitigation often has a small cost associated with the contractor’s management of the schedule and the overall project.
The contractor’s planning engineer needs to analyze the impact of delays on time to identify what are the available delay mitigation actions that could be considered. Some of the proposed mitigation actions might result in additional costs but for sure those are less expensive than the cost of delays for the project’s completion date. The contractor needs to make the project owner aware of all mitigation actions that the contractor is proposing to undertake. Those mitigation actions need to be communicated, reviewed, and approved or rejected by the project owner.
The Contractor Delay Mitigation Actions report will provide a register of all delay mitigation actions that were proposed by the contractor to recover delays that the contractor is responsible for. The report will classify proposed mitigation by their category along with a description of the mitigation action. The report will also detail which of those actions were approved by the project owner and those that were not approved. In addition, the report will detail the target schedule recovery days of each proposed mitigation action, actual number of days recovered and the variance between target and actual.
The form will also include three graphical visuals. The first donut chart will group proposed mitigation actions by their status as being approved or rejected by the project owner. The second donut chart will summarize the results of implemented mitigation actions as being very effective, effective, not effective, and not approved. The last chart shows a summary at the end of each update period of delays days targeted to be recovered by implementing the proposed mitigation actions, actual delay days recovered and the variance between what was targeted, and actual dates recovered.
Project Management Information Systems (PMIS) like PMWeb which is used to manage the many processes associated with the project schedule like those for baseline schedule submission review, schedule update review, extension of time (EOT) request, schedule narrative report among others, will be also used to manage the schedule mitigation actions. PMWeb visual form builder will be used to capture, monitor, evaluate and report on the contractor’s schedule mitigation proposals.
The Contractor Delay Mitigation Proposal form will be used to capture the details of all proposed mitigation actions, the category that best explains the proposed mitigation action, the number of days the proposed mitigation action will target to recover critical path delay, whether the action was approved by the project owner or not and the number of days that the proposal was actually able to reduce the current project delay. Of course, the form can include other fields depending on what is needed to be communicated for proposed mitigation actions.
For each proposed delay mitigation proposal submission all supportive documents will be attached as well as other relevant PMWeb records and imported MS Outlook emails will be linked. The attached documents include the project schedule report before incorporating the proposed mitigation action and after incorporating those actions to detail the impact of those actions on the schedule. All those documents can be uploaded and stored in their relevant folder or subfolder in PMWeb document management repository. Permission rights can be assigned to those folders to limit access to only those individuals who have been authorized to have the access to either only view or also edit.
A workflow can be assigned to the Contractor Delay Mitigation Proposal form to ensure that the proposed mitigation actions and the actual actions taken by the contractor to implement those actions are formally reviewed and approved by the project owner. PMWeb workflow will be used to create a workflow to map the submit, review and approvals tasks along with the duration set for each task and the individual accountable to perform the task.
