Public Sector Employers

Contract Administration, Dispute Boards, Project Management

The Board You Keep or the Board You Call: A Choice Made Long Before Anyone Argues

By Dr Samer Skaik

There is a box in the contract data of every works contract that gets filled in by someone who will never have to live with the consequences.

It is usually completed late in the tender preparation, often by a procurement officer working through a template under time pressure, sometimes by copying whatever was in the last one. It determines whether the project will have a dispute board sitting alongside it from the beginning, or whether one will be assembled at some future moment when things have gone wrong.

I have asked a number of public officials who made that decision on their project. In most cases the honest answer is that nobody made it. It was inherited. …

The Board You Keep or the Board You Call: A Choice Made Long Before Anyone ArguesRead More »

Construction Law, Contract Administration, Dispute Boards, Project Management

What Does a Dispute Board Actually Cost? A Straight Answer for Public Employers

Leave a Comment

By Dr Samer Skaik

Of all the questions I get asked by public sector clients, this is the one that arrives most often by private message rather than in the meeting.

People are slightly embarrassed to ask it. There is a sense that enquiring about the cost of a dispute mechanism is somehow unserious, or that it reveals you have not read something you should have read. So the question gets asked quietly, usually after the formal session has ended, and it is almost always phrased the same way: what does one of these actually cost us?

It is an entirely reasonable question and I wish more people asked it earlier and out loud. A project manager who cannot answer it cannot get the budget line approved, and a budget line that is not approved is one of the most common reasons a board never gets appointed at all. So let me try to answer it plainly. …

What Does a Dispute Board Actually Cost? A Straight Answer for Public EmployersRead More »

Construction Law, Contract Administration, Dispute Boards, Project Management

When the Banks moved onto FIDIC 2017: What Public Employers Inherited With the New Contract

Leave a Comment

By Dr Samer Skaik

A few years ago I sat in a workshop with the contract management team of a national roads agency. They were good at their jobs. Several of them had been administering donor-funded works contracts for well over a decade, and between them they had probably handled more claims than some law firms see in a generation.

About an hour in, one of the senior engineers said something that stopped the room. He said: we have been running this contract the way we ran the last four, and I am starting to think it is not the same contract.

He was right. It was not. …

When the Banks moved onto FIDIC 2017: What Public Employers Inherited With the New ContractRead More »

Construction Law, Contract Administration, Dispute Boards, Project Management

The First Four Weeks: How Public Infrastructure Employers Set a Project Up to Avoid Disputes

Leave a Comment

By Dr Samer Skaik

The call usually comes about eighteen months in.

Someone from an implementing agency, often a project manager who has inherited the file from a predecessor, explains that things have gone badly wrong. The ground turned out differently from the investigation report. The utility diversions never happened. The contractor has submitted a claim with a number in it large enough that it has now been seen by people several floors above the project office. And somewhere in the conversation comes the question I have learned to brace for: we think the contract requires us to have a dispute board — how quickly can one be set up? …

The First Four Weeks: How Public Infrastructure Employers Set a Project Up to Avoid DisputesRead More »