Telling a Contractor to Speed Up: The Instruction Employers Keep Getting Wrong
By Dr Samer Skaik
A project falls behind. The Employer becomes anxious. Somebody suggests that the Engineer should instruct the Contractor to accelerate, and a letter goes out.
What happens next depends entirely on a distinction that is rarely drawn at the time the letter is written, and the cost of getting it wrong runs in both directions. I have seen Employers believe they had purchased acceleration when they had bought nothing at all, and I have seen Contractors treat a routine progress instruction as a blank cheque and spend accordingly.
The provision at the centre of this is Sub-Clause 8.6 in the 1999 editions, renumbered 8.7 in 2017. It is worth being precise about what it does, because it is almost the opposite of what people assume. …
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