THE CRITICAL PATH

Six months late. Fourteen days reported. Eighty-four days to tell the truth.

Nadia Farouk is a senior planner who can make any schedule behave. When her company sends her to Dubai to "tidy the programme" on a troubled 600-bed hospital, she expects a few weeks of formatting. Instead she finds forty-seven date constraints hiding a six-month delay, a project director determined to keep his number, a client moving toward termination, and a contract clock counting down to the day her company's right to claim expires.

To save the project, Nadia must answer three questions that an old forensic delay expert writes on a napkin:

Whose delay is it? When did you know? Can you prove it?

And she must decide what to do when some of the answers belong to her own company.

A business novel and a complete project controls course in one book. Written by a practitioner with more than twenty years in planning, scheduling, delay analysis and construction claims, The Critical Path teaches the way the job is really learned: under pressure, on a real project, with real people. Along the way you will learn:

• The critical path method (CPM), total float, free float and the longest path
• Why mandatory constraints hide delay instead of removing it
• How to read a schedule health check, including the DCMA 14-point assessment
• Baselines, progress measurement, earned value management (EVM) and earned schedule
• Windows analysis, time impact analysis (TIA) and concurrent delay
• Notices, time bars and extension of time (EOT) claims under an international standard contract (FIDIC 2017)
• Resource levelling, recovery planning, and testing and commissioning
• How to write a one-page report that a board will actually read