Municipal Community Centre — Contractor-side forensic delay claim
The Situation
An Ontario municipality was building a new community centre, and the project had drifted well past its contractual milestones. The owner was pressing that delay onto the general contractor. Complicating the picture, part of the site sat with a separate house contractor the owner had engaged directly, so some of what looked like contractor slippage was work the contractor did not control.
The contractor’s project team had the factual story. What it needed was the schedule evidence to prove, update by update, which days were owner-caused and which were its own, before any extension-of-time claim left the desk.
How the Analysis Was Built
Working in-house as the contractor’s planning and scheduling lead, CPP’s principal built the full forensic delay analysis from the schedule record, window by window, to AACE Recommended Practice 29R-03. The schedule updates were analyzed contemporaneously, the delay events were isolated and documented individually, and every critical-path delay was traced to its root cause, with concurrent delay allocated conservatively in the owner’s favour rather than the contractor’s.
- Reconstructed the as-planned, interim, and as-built states across the contemporaneous schedule update record
- Isolated and documented each discrete delay event, with its own forensic analysis
- Traced every critical-path delay to root cause; where the general contractor’s activities sat on the critical path, the predecessor chain showed them waiting on owner or design review
- Quantified the total project slip, and after conservative concurrent-delay allocation attributed the owner-caused balance, with the contractor’s own share conceded on the record
- Built the House Contract Handover event on GC 6.5.1 (delay caused by others the owner had engaged), supported by the contractor’s three notices of delay that went unanswered
- Assembled the extension-of-time package: a 21-sheet attribution workbook, individual forensic documents per delay event, a master handover document, an executive briefing, and an interactive dashboard
Tools Deployed
What Was Distinctive
Where the contractor’s activities touched the critical path, tracing the predecessor chain showed who was actually driving the delay. In the main, the contractor was waiting on owner or design review rather than driving it.
And rather than push every concurrent day onto the owner, the analysis conceded the contractor’s own share of the concurrent delay. Giving those days back on the record is what made the owner-caused balance very hard to argue with.
The Outcome
The extension-of-time package comprised the window-by-window attribution, the delay register, the individual forensic documents per event, and the executive briefing, all built from the contemporaneous schedule record and traced to root cause.
Outcome: resolved at full monetary recovery with a time extension. Specific resolution figures are confidential.
Whose delay is it, actually?
On either side of a delay dispute, when a project drifts past its milestones a window-by-window forensic shows, update by update, whose days they actually are. Fixed-fee preliminary assessment in two weeks. No hourly burn.
Talk to CPP → Or email us directly →