A contractor came to us convinced a six-week delay was entirely down to late information from the design team. The programme told a more complicated story.
Some of the delay was genuinely on the critical path and attributable to late instructions. Some of it overlapped with the contractor's own resourcing problems on an unrelated section of the works — concurrent delay, in the technical sense, not just bad luck with timing.
An extension of time claim built on the first cause alone would have unravelled under scrutiny. Untangling the two was the actual job.
