Six months late. Fourteen days reported. Eighty-four days to tell the truth.
Nadia Farouk is a senior planner who can make any schedule behave. When her company sends her to Dubai to "tidy the programme" on a troubled 600-bed hospital, she expects a few weeks of formatting. Instead she finds forty-seven date constraints hiding a six-month delay, a project director determined to keep his number, a client moving toward termination, and a contract clock counting down to the day her company's right to claim expires.
To save the project, Nadia must answer three questions that an old forensic delay expert writes on a napkin:
Whose delay is it? When did you know? Can you prove it?
And she must decide what to do when some of the answers belong to her own company.
A business novel and a complete project controls course in one book. Written by a practitioner with more than twenty years in planning, scheduling, delay analysis and construction claims, The Critical Path teaches the way the job is really learned: under pressure, on a real project, with real people. Along the way you will learn:
- The critical path method (CPM), total float, free float and the longest path
- Why mandatory constraints hide delay instead of removing it
- How to read a schedule health check, including the DCMA 14-point assessment
- Baselines, progress measurement, earned value management (EVM) and earned schedule
- Windows analysis, time impact analysis (TIA) and concurrent delay
- Notices, time bars and extension of time (EOT) claims under an international standard contract (FIDIC 2017)
- Resource levelling, recovery planning, and testing and commissioning
- How to write a one-page report that a board will actually read
