Consider the following hypothetical example.1 Structural steelwork and cladding are each critical activities on the contractor’s original programme: the critical path follows the structural steelwork for 10 weeks from its planned start on site until it moves to the on-site cladding activities for four weeks; subsequent activities, and in particular aspects of the M/E work, thereafter come onto the planned critical path. The contractor fails to procure the structural steelwork in due time. This eventually results in a three-week delayed start to the steelwork on site. Quite independently, the architect fails to provide relevant information regarding the cladding to be fixed to the steelwork, so that the cladding work is not able to start on site until three weeks later than originally planned. Either the steelwork or the cladding delays taken in isolation would have caused a three-week delay to completion of the project; at the end of the day the project finishes three weeks late, having experienced no further impacts to progress.

My reading of the Society of Construction Law Protocol on Extensions of Time and Financial Compensation is that a delay expert running its favoured form of delay analysis, i.e., the Time Impact Analysis—which is a “method of delay analysis where the impacts of particular delays are mapped out at the point in time at which they occur, allowing the discrete effect of individual events to be determined”2 based on “ … the effect of Delay Events on the Contractor’s intentions for the future conduct of the work in the light of progress actually achieved at the time of the Delay Event”3—would conclude that the whole of the three weeks’ delay is attributable to the steelwork, and that none of it is attributable to the cladding. That is because the steelwork problem would be encountered first, and a delay recorded against it of three weeks; by the time the cladding

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