Island Gold Mine Mill Expansion — Disruption, Delay & Acceleration
The Challenge
The self-perform contractor was executing the mill-expansion scope at the Island Gold Mine, in Dubreuilville, Ontario, under a unit-rate contract with owner Alamos Gold. Through the work the sequence was repeatedly interrupted: owner-directed changes, out-of-sequence direction, trade-stacking, and stop-start mobilizations, layered with acceleration pressure. The impacts did not present as clean, discrete critical-path delays. They accumulated as productivity loss across the work fronts, which a conventional two-snapshot CPM analysis does not capture on its own.
The contract was terminated for convenience at partial completion. That raised the evidentiary bar: with no completed as-built to point to, the claim had to be proved from the contemporaneous record, event by event.
How the Analysis Was Built
Working in-house for the self-perform contractor, CPP’s principal built a contractor-side disruption, delay and acceleration analysis on the contemporaneous project record. Rather than a windows analysis, the work used an as-planned-versus-as-built comparison with an event-by-event impacted baseline and cumulative carry-through, chosen so that contractor-caused and owner-caused impacts could be separated cleanly across the life of the job. Method selection followed the record: with the job stopped mid-course and no completed as-built, the selection factors in AACE RP 29R-03 point to an event-based approach rather than a windows analysis.
- Established the as-planned baseline from the post-tender-clarification schedule and reconstructed the as-built from the contemporaneous record
- Identified and characterized each discrete delay and disruption event across successive forensic passes
- Built an event-by-event impacted baseline, carrying each event's effect forward cumulatively so downstream impact was neither lost nor double-counted
- Separated contractor-responsible from owner-responsible impact at each event, rather than presenting a single undifferentiated number
- Ingested and threaded the correspondence record (emails, RFIs, change directives, daily logs) to tie each event to its documentary trigger
- Quantified the disruption and acceleration exposure, with the productivity-loss component measured against unimpacted reference work
- Assembled a quantified, exhibit-backed position paper: delay register, cause-and-effect Gantt charts, and Primavera P6 XER files formatted for direct import
Tools Deployed
The Outcome
The contractor's leadership received a quantified, exhibit-backed position paper in which every impact was tied to the contemporaneous record and separated by responsibility. What had been a general sense of being disrupted and pushed became a structured claim: named events, a documented cause for each, and a defensible basis for the time and cost consequences.
Because the impact was carried through cumulatively rather than assessed one snapshot at a time, the analysis held together on a job that was stopped mid-course, where a completed as-built was never going to exist.
The Result
Status: confidential. The position paper was delivered to the contractor's leadership for negotiation with the owner. The specific quantum and the current status of the matter are confidential.
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