Public Sector Employers

Construction Law, Contract Administration, Dispute Boards, Project Management

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

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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. …

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Construction Law, Contract Administration, Dispute Boards, Project Management

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

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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. …

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Construction Law, Contract Administration, Dispute Boards, Project Management

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

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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? …

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