Delays and issues

The delay record is the part of the diary that turns into money, or fails to.

Recording a delay

Project delays records what held the job up, and Delay today (days) is how much time was actually lost.

Record the cause as specifically as you can, because the cause decides who pays:

Cause	Usually
Weather	Extension of time, no cost
Client decision outstanding	Extension and often compensable
Design change / late documentation	Extension and often compensable
Latent condition — rock, contamination	Extension and usually a variation
Subcontractor no-show	Yours to absorb
Materials not ordered in time	Yours to absorb

Writing “delay” with no cause makes every one of those rows look the same, which in practice means they are all treated as the last two.

Cost issues and programme issues

Two separate lists, because they are different problems.

Programme issues cost time. Cost issues cost money. A single event can be both — rock in the excavation stops the digger and costs to remove — and recording it in both places is right.

Keeping them apart makes the diary answerable: “what has cost us time this month?” is a different question from “what has cost us money?”, and both get asked.

Client-caused delays

The most valuable entries in the diary, and the ones most often left out because they feel awkward to write down.

If a client takes three weeks to choose tiles while the tiler stands by, that is a delay caused by the client. Record it on the day it starts, not on the day you decide to claim for it.

Tell the client at the time, too

A delay recorded but never mentioned is a surprise at the end. A client told “we are holding the tiler, and each week costs us programme” usually decides faster — and cannot reasonably object later when the extension is claimed.

Turning the record into a claim

When you need an extension of time:

1. Find the days. Filter the diary to the affected period.
2. Check the causes are recorded and specific.
3. Check the weather matches, for wet-weather days — it is recorded automatically from the site address.
4. Print the days as diary forms.
5. Submit within the contract’s notice period. This is the one that catches people — a well-documented delay claimed too late is worth nothing.

The printed run of days is the submission. It is contemporaneous, it is specific, and it was made before anybody knew there would be an argument, which is exactly what gives it weight.

Delays and the schedule

The diary records that time was lost. The schedule is where you move the work.

Recording a delay does not reschedule anything — update the affected task in the Schedule so everything downstream moves with it, and the finish date tells you the truth.

Doing one without the other is the common failure: a diary full of recorded delays next to a programme that still claims the original completion date.

What a good delay entry looks like

28 Oct — 1.0 day lost. Rain from 7am, 22mm. Slab pour scheduled for today postponed; concrete and pump cancelled by 7:30am, no charge. Rescheduled Thursday 31st. Formwork and reo left covered.

Cause, quantity, what it stopped, what it cost, and what happens next. That paragraph is worth more than a month of entries reading “rain”.