Windows analysis

Hi there. (apologies in advance for the long winded article)

I am currently working on rebutting a Contractors claim. 

The Contractor has presented the delay analysis using a Time impact analysis to demonstrate the effect of the Employers delaying events.  I am pretty certain that in a lot of the cases the Contractor was concurrently in delay but need to prove it.

I am looking to adopt a Windows as planned Versus As built analysis to assess what the Critical path was on a monthly basis, i plan to do this as follows;

1. Identify the Baseline programme

2. Correct any anomalies in the programme, unnecessary constraints, missing logic etc with contractors approval.

3.Import the progress for month 1 into the baseline programme and asess any movement to key milestones and identify the Critical path for that month, lack of progress or activites late starting etc will be identified as the critical delay for that month.

4. Then import progress for month 2 into the updated programme from step 3 above, and again asess any movement to key milestones and identify critical path, this procedure will be repeated to the Project completion/last available update.

This method retains the Contractors baseline logic (in front of the data date) and this is where i believe i may be going wrong. 

Having read an article By David Barry on delay analysis he recommends that the future intention of the Contractor must be taken into consideration at each window, so for example say in Window 3 the Contractor was planing to try and carry out some works concurrently during the latter stages of the project in an attempt to mitigate delay then this must be accounted for, ie change the logic to reflect the planned mitigation.

By making the said changes to logic it will undoubtedly lessen the entitlement to Contractors EOT for that month where as leaving the logic as per the baseline logic will give the Contractor a greater entitlement for that month.

I believe that by leaving the logic as per the baseline the mitigation of delay will be accounted for when the progress is assesed for the period in question, ie the work that was planned to be carried out sequentailly and is then carried out concurrently will result in an earlier forecast for the milestone and go down as mitigation for the contractor. 

By changing the future logic and say for example the planned mitigation never materialises for whatever reason i believe will then go down as delay against the contractor for the period in question even though he thought he could mitigate some delay but then never materialises.

So my question is should the logic in front of the data be as per the monthly updates or should the Basleine logic be retained, i understand that if there is a new revision to the Baseline then obviously that then becomes the planned intent of the Contractor.

Apologies for the long winded article and thanks in advance for any thoughts/advice