’Experienced’ delay analysts

Okie....let me share a joke with u all....



Part-1



One day a man was having a conversation with God when his whole life flashed before his eyes as a series of footsteps on the sands of time. He saw that there were two pairs of footprints, but during the most difficult periods of his life there were only one set of footprints. He asked God "You said you will be with me throughout this journey, but why have you deserted me during the most critical times of my life??" to which God answered "Son, I did not desert you, I was always with you...you see only one set of footprints because during those difficult times in your life, I was carrying you in my hands"







Part-2



Another day I was having a similar conversation with my Project Manager (PM) when my whole project flashed before my eyes as a series of footsteps on the sands of time. I saw that there were two pairs of footprints, but during the most difficult times in the project there were only one set of footprints. I asked my PM "You said you will be with me throughout the project, but why have you deserted me during the most critical times of the project??" to which the PM answered "Son, I did not desert you, I was always with you...you see only one set of footprints because during those difficult times, I was sitting on your head!!"

Andrew, David,



Here in darkest Africa, it is not the lack of planners that is worrying, it is the lack of anybody competent and especially design engineers and those who draft contract documents.



There are incalculable Euros, Dollars, GBPs etc of aid money poured into Africa on projects where the site investigation and survey have apparently done from a passing 747 and the design Drawings, Specifications and bills have been merely re-named from a job in West Wales.



Any psychic planner with his own crystal ball will become "experienced" in delay analysis very quickly!

David,



More very true words, yes there is a lack of experienced planners out there - but there appears to be as big a lack at senior and very senior management level of any appreciation of the benefits of having a planner on site. Especially the smaller projects. Lets have one planner covering 5 small jobs - and through no fault of his/her own, time only allows him/her to have a minimum input. Job goes wrong, well what was the planner doing?????



A very old but relevant saying "Fail to plan, plan to fail" springs to mind.

Richard,



That’s certainly one of the reasons.



Currently looking at a job where the planner appears to have done a good job, but contractor isn’t being awarded the EoT he believes he’s entitled to. Contractor saying one thing, contract administrator saying another, who does the Client believe? Client - can an independent third party come and tell me what the real situation is please?



I’m guessing the real situation may turn out to be somewhere in between as often is the case, have to wait and see!



So there are many reasons why we get involved in jobs but it’s always down to the failure of someone somewhere not doing what they should have done, whether that be contractor, planner, contract administrator, employer, etc, etc. Doing the right thing very often simply comes down to being fair and reasonable and taking resonsibility for the risks you took on, whichever party you are.



That said, at the time is if often the case that the party who it is eventually proved to be incorrect actually genuinely believes he was doing the right thing at the time. So how do you stop these situations arising - true answer is you can’t, we’re all human beings.

Bryan,



Grey hair or just plain losing it. Mine’s retained its colour, just less of it these days!!!

Hi Nieman,



Briefly a delay analyst in the pure sense would assist a "claims artist" to prove the case for a contractor for more time and more money in a situation of change or delay.



If he was working for an Employer, he would be analysing actual events to disprove or at least reduce the contractor’s claim[s].



With a certain amount of contractual and language knowledge he may specialize in claims.



Experienced comes with grey hair and often generates an entitlement to higher fees if you are an advisor. If you are an employee it may not have the same advantages.



All the best

I’ve only just joined, and I am confused.



What does a delay analyst do?



Tell you that you are in delay? - Thats a planners job



Present you with a series of what ifs as a way out? - Thats a planners job



Tell you how you got into the situation in the first case? - Thats a planners job



So what is an experienced delay analyst? - An experienced planner.

Yes clive i totally agree with you....specially "Planning is like growing"



But to be a delay analyst u need to work on some quality project as i said in my previous post but to be an expert delay analyst u need number of quality projects and then of course your number of year experience is countable.



I might be wrong.....

Sorry i missed this post and read it today only,

and i really want to put my opinion here.



I feel reading books only on delay analysis can not help you, you also don’t need a 10-15 or 20 year experience to be a good delay analyst, i feel you need a quality project exposure to be a good analyst and your number of year experience is not very important.



If you are working on a project with say only 2 year experience as a planner but the project is very complicated and have all type of delays in it and you are working hard to understand theory and then implementing it in your project then i feel thats the best way to become a good delay analyst.



in short what you need to be a good delay analyst

1. Knowledge of Project Management/ Planning

2. A quality project (a project having all type of delay in it)

3. Theoretical knowledge of delay analysis



Impact the schedule with reasons check your result & re-think.

Davids,



I have just spent 5 days over the last couple of months or so showing someone working for a contractor how to do a TIA and explaining the JCT extension of time / LD clauses. It was a live claim and I took him through the process.



Even after 5 days, a live example and plenty of discussion on the workings of the JCT contract, I could still easily spend another 2 or 3 days further explaining the contract provision and the finer points of TIA.



Thats 7 or 8 days (60 to 70 hours). Reduce that to a 2.5 hour lecture, say twice a week and that’s 12 plus weeks on one subject and one contract!!!!! Or to put it another way, about one whole college term. Don’t think a course would be short of information to pass on, just short of time.

Dave



I totally agree with your statement that :



‘This brings me to the point where so many of todays planners/delay analysts go wrong - "I read the book and can use the software - I’m an expert’



This statement really shows the true picture in the planning industry now a day

For my sins I had to allow work to get in the way of the NUF day.



I agree with you that those leaving academia in their early twenties will be ill equipped to do planning let alone any type of forensic analysis. I certainly wasn’t taught much about the subject when I did my first degree.



The MSc at Kings College touches on delay analysis techniques but is more geared towards the legal aspects and arguments to do with time than the practical methods of actually doing the analysis. That said, it as a course I thoroughly recommend it to all and everyone. I started it thinking I had a decent working knowledge of the law through my experience but was soon proved wrong. Not sure if it was the first or second lecture when I came to that conclusion. Possibly it was when I got the reading list and bought a couple of book prior to starting!!!!!!!!!!!



But, along with the academic learning, to plan and programme you have to get your head around how things are put together and in what order along with a whole host of other things. Some of which comes from experience, some from on the job training if you’re lucky enough to get it.



2 years, part time, Diploma in Planning, programming and forensic delay analysis. As my previous post suggested, you would have absolutely no problem filling the time, probably the oposite problem of what to leave out.

Hi Andrew



I expected to see you at the NUF for our annual self-appreciation day!



I agree with what you say about higher education and planning and programming. Eee, when I were a lad…Ray Oxley was one of my lecturers at Sheffield Polytechnic and we had four hours a week (I think) for three years. Now I think, on most undergraduate courses, it is an optional module on predominantly management based courses (apologies to my colleagues in academia, you know I love you and am only jealous of your positions).



Again, I may be wrong but my recent and not so recent experience, is that most construction graduates are really construction orientated managers – I am not suggesting they are inferior, far from it, their ambition, application and stamina scares me (or am I just getting old). the trouble , after spending a spell as a planner with a contractor (and again who else provides on the job training these days) they want to progress to contracts management or project management. So there tends not to be the depth of experience or desire to study the subject further.



The main provider of delay and disruption courses is, of course, your friend and mine, Mr P. I do think this might be changing soon but I don’t think two-day course, although better than nothing, are the answer. The Kings College MSc degree Construction Law & Dispute Resolution is obviously the premier qualification for those who are interested in the legal side, I don’t know how much practical application of D & D analysis techniques there is on the programme.



Maybe what is needed (and I might suggest this) is say, a part-time study diploma. Courses though do have to pay their way and I am not sure if there is enough demand out there without licences to practice.



Regards



David

Hello David,



Long time since we’ve heard from you. As I’m a person who has gained his knowledge from a good mixture of experience and under/postgraduate study I believe your comments to be very valid.



The only comment I would make is that if you are just looking to gain further experience in delay analysis and the surrounding subject area only, you’re at abit of a loss to find a suitable course.



Reading books is obviously good, helps expand your knowledge and to be encouraged, but I don’t actually know of a course where you could go and have all the delay analysis techniques, applicable legal arguments, etc, properly explained and demonstrated. There may be one out there or even a more general course that deals with planning / programming/delay analysis issues in that detail but I’m yet to hear about one.



Anyone know of one because it’s a question I’m often asked?



Ironically I was discussing this exact subject with someone not that long ago and off the top of our heads as we stood there we named sufficient subject areas to do with planning/programming/delay analysis that would easilly fill a 2 year part time course. The discussion started because neither of us knew of this type of course anywhere!

David



Sorry to have come into this one late but as you know, sometimes I am a bit derogatory about some of those who now are calling themselves expert planners and expert delay analysts but who have not planned a live job in anger in their lives. Whilst ‘expert’ is a subjective word, I believe that to be an ‘expert’ delay analyst you first have to be an ‘expert’ planner.



I strongly disagree with Nigel, if I am correct in what he is suggesting, when he equates Experience to Academic Learning. Whilst ‘academic learning’ may be no substitute for ‘on the job experience’ it is a short cut to advancing our knowledge. Society would not progress if we did not study and take on board what our predecessors have learnt or discovered – we can’t expect to discover everything about a subject for ourselves. ‘Academic learning’, in my opinion, is about finding out best practice and what other do and have done prior to us arriving naively in the scene and investigating and examining objectively techniques, procedures and so on.



Academic rigour, the methodology of research, does allow the development of techniques that that could not have been previously considered by practitioners. Bar charts, CPM, linked bar charts, AdePT and so on all came out of research studies to improve on what practitioners at the time were doing. Similarly, techniques such as Time Impact Analysis were only formalised as part of academic research. The next thing, maybe System Dynamics (see the work by Terry Williams) could be the next best thing but hardly likely to have been developed by we mere ‘grunts’ in the field.



Similarly I am not convinced by the ‘experience’ argument. It does of course, as others have intimated, depend on what and how good that experience has been. If all projects a planner has been involved with have exceeded the programme times and all delay claims made have been thwarted, well maybe that level of experience does not count for much.



Anyway, going back to David’s original question I did some research a few years back about how those who dealt in claims acquired their knowledge. The sources of knowledge were:

Experience/self taught

Text books/journals/papers

Short course/seminar

Undergraduate course

Postgraduate course

Other practitioners

Any other

The overwhelming indication was that most practitioners gain their knowledge through experience or are self-taught, 88% of respondents indicated this as their primary or secondary source of knowledge. My view at that time was that this ought to be a cause for concern, especially to centres of higher education as only 8% of respondent gained their knowledge from undergraduate or postgraduate courses even though 75% of respondents were holders of first or higher degrees. I am currently helping to update this research and I hope, but do not expect, the situation to have changed.



To put this into some sort of context, how would you feel if the Expert in a medical negligence case admitted he had picked his knowledge up as he went along, or conversely, that he had read a few books and as this seemed to be a growth area thought he would have a go.



Now for a blatant plug… a friend of mine who has studied formally and who is an ace practitioner has written a book and I recommend it as an accessible read into a sometimes complex subject. About Time: Delay Analysis in Construction, by Stephen Lowsley & Christopher Linnet, RICS Books (2005).



If I have offended anyone please accept my apologies – I did not intend to.



Regards



David

Hi Andrew,



You are totally correct; when I was a site agent, I made it my business to be able to any work that I was in charge of, driving 631s, D9s,etc, to cutting out steel in a pipe jack hole through. The men that work for you appreciate it and you are the ultimate "expert witness" when you become mixed up in disputes. Also you understand the loss of production that very long hours inflict on workmen.



Having been trained as a land surveyor, became an engineer by osmosis and being a Q.S. by inclination wasn’t bad training either.



As you say, H&S and the unions have precluded our sort of training.

Clive,



Well I never got paid for it but in my early dayes I used to take every oppertunity to jump on any piece of plant and have ago - guess you could put it down to a big kid playing with big toys!!!! Dump trucks, scrapers, excavators, graders (too many levers), crawler cranes - anything really and the bigger the better! I could sort of operate all of them to a fashion but with zero finnesse or real expertise.



But it was fun and on a more serious note, it taught me alot about what could and couldn’t be done with the plant.



I think H&S laws would probably not allow it these days, again another piece of "training" that the younger generation miss out on today.

Roger,



Everything you say is 100% true and I’d totally forgotten that as the junior engineer on site I had to do the two weekly programme every week. Those that did it will understand. Planning and programming training started early in those days.



But I must confess, the contractor I worked for paid overtime for weekends so I guess I was spoilt!

My experience was similar. It was then cheaper to employ a Junior Engineer as a chainman rather than pay the going rate for a labourer. As you say the experience was invaluable. Who can blame anyone who has served the "apprenticeship" of working unpaid overtime and weekends for recouping some of the early days investment.

I also recall hat all engineers used to do a two week rolling programme but they were never called "Planners".

David,



It certainly wasn’t by any conscious decision, but I came up by way of the little projects first route before getting into larger ones. Junior Setting Out Engineer and tea boy through to Project Manager. All I can say (although probably biased here) looking back, it gave me a very wide and varied experience which has been, and still is, invaluable.



Being only on long duration projects from day one of your career would appear limiting to me in the way you describe, but I would like to hear from those who have done it that way to see what they think.

Clive,



I guess there is no right answer, planner 2 may have seen all or most of the jobs from start to finish, probably the last 3 at least as Project Manager.



You could say neither of them, go and find someone who’s worked on a Gas Terminal but that’s obviously not often an option in real life.



Just trying to make the point that comparing two people having x years in the industry doesn’t always equate to those two people having the same or even the right experience for something.

But I guess you have to ask does time spent actually mean good experience?



As an example,



Planner 1 Projects:

£70m Airport Terminal contract- 3.5 years

£50m Power station contract - 3 years

£100m Dam contract- 3.5 years



3 large projects, started a junior engineer and now in middle to senior site management role.



Planner 2 Projects:

£1m Sewage treatment works - 1 year

£5m Building contract - 1 year

£5m Road contract - 1 year

£10m Airport runway contract - 1 year

£8m Commercial Builidng contract - 1 year

£12m Water Treatment contract - 1 year

£15m Rail contract - 2 years

£20m Bridge contract - 1 year

£18m Power Station contract - 1 year



Started as junior engineer, now and has been for the last 4 years, the Project Manager.



Assuming they both know equal ammounts about doing delay analysis, you have to choose one to do an analysis for a £5m claim on a £30m gas terminal contract. Both have been in the industry 10 years, but who’s got the better experience and which would you choose?

I think there’s got to be a mix of experience and knowledge.



Knowing just the mechanics of delay analysis isn’t enough as that will only give you a theoretical result when the correct one usually entails a mix of the theoretical tempered with common sense and experience.

To pick the things quickly and understanding of a few planning techniques does not make an individual a good Delay Analysts. Project Experience is the main key factor for that which must be considered. Not require years of experience but upto a reasonable limit.

Experience. Academic learning - for want of a better phrase - is all well and good but the actual experience of ’doing it’ is usually far better.



We have all come across those highly qualified people that are no doubt excellent in theoretical situations but put them into a practical area and they lose out to the old hands that can barely read and write but have been there, seen it and not only got the tee shirt but built the factory that makes them!



Not quite in the same field, but I once knew a highly qualified computer engineer that could design from computer chips up to finished computers. But when wiring a plug, didn’t have a clue which colour went where.



Subjective opinion, aren’t they all, but from my (fairly well) qualified and, years of, experience that is the situation as I see it. Youngsters with theoretical knowledge will learn quicker and have a better understanding eventually but it does take experience.



Cheers



Nige