Why Projects Go Wrong in Month Two
WHAT HAPPENED · ILLUSTRATIVE COMPOSITE
The mobilisation on a ₦2.8 billion teaching hospital block on the FIDIC Red Book went well. The site was fenced by the end of week two, the first concrete was poured inside month one, and the first monthly report said the project was in good health. On any measure a project team would recognise, it was.
In month three the setting-out was found to be wrong. The survey control the Employer had issued placed the building line roughly 400 millimetres off against the boundary the planning consent assumed. It was an error in the items of reference, not the Contractor’s work — and Sub-Clause 4.7.2 gives the Contractor a window to notify exactly that. The window is stated in the Contract Data and, where nothing is stated, runs 28 days from the Commencement Date. Nobody had checked the reference points against the boundary until the frame started to rise.
The programme had gone the same way. The Contractor had submitted an initial programme it regarded as indicative, intending to firm it up once the piling results were in. The Engineer, newly appointed and still reading in, said nothing for a month. Under Sub-Clause 8.3 a Notice of No-objection is deemed given if the Engineer does not comment within 21 days. The indicative programme had become the Programme, and it was the baseline against which every later delay was measured.
Neither failure was a failure of construction. Both were failures of the first sixty days, and both were invisible while they were happening.
“Nothing went wrong in month two. That was the problem — the things that should have happened did not, and nothing happens when nothing happens.”
The shape of the problem
Ask a project manager when a project is most at risk and the answer is usually the end — the final account, the completion date, the defects period. That is where the arguments become visible. It is very rarely where they were caused. A striking proportion of the disputes that surface in month fourteen turn on something that either happened or failed to happen in the first sixty days, when nobody was looking because the project was going well.
The reason is structural rather than cultural. Almost every obligation a construction contract imposes is recurring — measure monthly, certify monthly, report monthly — and recurring obligations build their own habits. A small number are one-off and dated. They fall due once, early, and usually to people who have been on the project a fortnight. There is no rhythm to catch them, no previous cycle to compare against, and in most cases no certificate or payment that visibly fails to arrive when they are missed.
Scope. This article addresses the FIDIC Conditions of Contract for Construction, Second Edition 2017 as reprinted in 2022 with amendments (the Red Book), and the JCT Standard Building Contract With Quantities 2024 Edition (SBC/Q 2024), with the 2016 edition noted where it differs. Clause numbering is given throughout so that every claim can be checked. Cases are illustrative composites drawn from recurring patterns rather than accounts of identified projects and are labelled where they appear. Periods are those in the published forms; particular conditions frequently change them, and should be read before any date is diarised.
Failure one — the deadlines that run from a letter, not from site
The scenario. The site team counts from the day it took possession. That is the day the project became real to them, and it is the anchor for everything they manage.
The mechanics. Several of the Red Book’s earliest obligations are not anchored there at all. The Performance Security is to be delivered within 28 days of the Contractor receiving the Letter of Acceptance (Sub-Clause 4.2.1). The Commencement Date is notified by the Engineer not less than 14 days in advance, and where the particular conditions say nothing it falls within 42 days of the Letter of Acceptance (Sub-Clause 8.1). The setting-out window at Sub-Clause 4.7.2 runs from the Commencement Date rather than from possession or from the first survey. Three different anchors, none of them the day the hoarding went up.
The consequence. The people who hold the anchor dates — the commercial team who received the Letter of Acceptance, the Engineer who issued the commencement notice — are usually not the people running the site diary. The information sits in a different filing system from the one being consulted.
The nuance that gets missed. The setting-out window is the one that bites hardest, because the error it protects against is the Employer’s. Items of reference are issued to the Contractor; if they are wrong and the Contractor notifies inside the window, the position is very different from the Contractor discovering the same error later, having built to it. The check that closes this exposure — tie the issued reference points to an independent boundary survey — takes a day and is almost never programmed.
Failure two — the clocks that run against the certifier
The scenario. The Contractor submits early and hears nothing. Silence reads as neither approval nor rejection, so the submission is treated as still open.
The mechanics. Under the Red Book it is very often neither open nor rejected but accepted. The Engineer must give notice of any comment on the initial programme within 21 days of receiving it, and on a revised programme within 14 days; failing that, a Notice of No-objection is deemed to have been given. Because the defined term ‘Programme’ means the programme to which the Engineer has given, or is deemed to have given, a Notice of No-objection, the effect is not administrative. The submitted document becomes the contractual programme. The Quality Management System works the same way under Sub-Clause 4.9.1 — the Engineer has 21 days, and silence is deemed No-objection.
The consequence. This is the 2017 suite’s deliberate design. The 1999 edition let submissions sit unanswered indefinitely, and the deeming provisions were introduced to stop that. But a deemed acceptance is still a decision, and it is a decision nobody made — which means nobody records it, and nobody tells the site team that the baseline is now fixed.
The nuance that gets missed. It cuts against the Employer as often as the Contractor, and month two is exactly when a newly appointed Engineer is least able to review anything properly. An Engineer who lets an over-optimistic programme become the Programme by silence has handed the Contractor a favourable baseline for every delay analysis for the next two years. The same logic reaches the claims machinery: under Sub-Clause 20.2.2 an Engineer who does not Notice a late Notice of Claim within 14 days finds that the Notice is deemed valid however late it was.
Failure three — the payment rhythm that sets itself and then locks
The scenario. The first valuation is late by a week because the team is still assembling. Everyone agrees it will settle down. It does settle down — around the wrong dates.
The mechanics. Under SBC/Q the interim cycle is a chain of fixed intervals rather than a convention. The due date for an interim payment is seven days after the Interim Valuation Date (clause 4.8); the Interim Certificate is to be issued not later than five days after the due date (clause 4.9); the final date for payment is fourteen days from the due date (clause 4.11); and a Pay Less Notice must be given not later than five days before the final date for payment (clauses 4.11 and 4.12). Each date is computed from the one before it, so the whole chain moves when the first link does.
The consequence. The month-two consequence is that the first Interim Valuation Date effectively sets the calendar for the life of the contract, and it is usually set by whoever happened to be free that week. The more serious consequence is at the other end of the chain: where no Payment Notice and no Pay Less Notice are given in time, the sum applied for becomes the sum due. That is a payment risk created entirely by a diary, and month two is when the diary is written.
The nuance that gets missed. The Red Book runs its own early chain — the Contractor’s statements, the Engineer’s Interim Payment Certificates, and the Employer’s payment periods under Clause 14 — and it too is calibrated from the first cycle. Whichever form applies, the useful discipline is the same: put the first six payment cycles in a shared calendar in month one, with the notice deadlines on it, not just the valuation dates.
“A deemed acceptance is still a decision. It is simply a decision that nobody made, nobody minuted, and nobody told the site team about.”
The case against blaming month two
The strongest objection is that this is hindsight wearing a calendar. Projects fail for reasons that are visible throughout — an underpriced tender, a design that was never finished, an employer who cannot fund the works, a contractor without the resource. Tracing those failures back to a missed notice in week six mistakes the paperwork for the cause. A project with sound commercial fundamentals survives a badly administered first two months; a project without them fails whatever the diary says.
There is a second objection with real force in this market. Month two is also when the team is thinnest, and telling a mobilising site to run a compliance calendar competes directly with getting the works out of the ground. On a project where the employer’s funding release is the actual constraint — which describes a great many Nigerian public contracts — the marginal hour is better spent on the funding chain than on the notice chain. Perfect administration of a project that is not being paid for is an expensive way to be right.
A third: the deeming provisions this article treats as a trap were introduced as a remedy. The 1999 position, where a submission could sit unanswered for a year, was worse for everybody, and it is a strange argument that says the fix is now the problem. The honest framing is that the 2017 suite transferred risk from delay to inattention, which is a better trade, not a costless one.
Where that leaves it. The objections are right that month two is a multiplier rather than a cause. But multipliers are worth attending to precisely because they are cheap. Almost every item in this article costs an afternoon in the first sixty days and is unrecoverable afterwards, which is an unusually good ratio in contract administration.
What to do in the first sixty days
1. Build the calendar from the letter, not from the site. Take the Letter of Acceptance date and the Commencement Date notice, and diarise every period that runs from either. They are the two anchors the site team does not naturally hold.
2. Check the information you were issued against something independent. Tie the setting-out reference points to a boundary survey you commissioned. Read the bills against the drawings. Both exercises are cheap now and are the subject of dated notice windows that close quietly.
3. Treat a submission as accepted the day the review period expires. Diarise the certifier's period alongside your own submission, and write to confirm the position when it passes. If the deeming has operated in your favour, you want that recorded while it is uncontroversial.
4. Decide what the programme is for before you submit it. Under the Red Book an indicative programme can become the Programme by silence. If a submission is not intended as the baseline, say so on its face and say when the baseline will follow.
5. Set the first six payment cycles in month one. Valuation dates, due dates, certificate dates, final dates and notice deadlines, in a calendar both sides can see. The chain computes from the first link, and the expensive end of it is the notice deadline, not the valuation.
Who actually holds each of these
Most of the first-sixty-days failures are not failures of diligence but of custody. The obligation sits with the project, and the information needed to discharge it sits with one person who has not been asked. Naming the holder is usually the whole fix.
On custody. None of that requires a new role. It requires one page in the project execution plan naming who holds each date, written in month one while there is still time for the answer to matter.
THE BROADER POINT
Month two is quiet because nothing has gone wrong yet. That is exactly what makes it dangerous.
The obligations that fall due in the first sixty days are one-off, dated, and mostly invisible when they are missed. There is no failed certificate, no missed payment, no angry letter — the project simply proceeds, with a baseline it did not choose, a notice window that has closed, and a payment calendar set by accident. The bill arrives in month fourteen, and by then it reads as a dispute about delay rather than what it is, which is a dispute about a fortnight in month two.
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CLAUSE REFERENCES
FIDIC Conditions of Contract for Construction, 2nd Edition 2017 (reprinted 2022 with amendments) — SC 4.2.1 delivery of the Performance Security; SC 4.7.2 setting out errors; SC 4.9.1 Quality Management System; SC 8.1 Commencement of Works; SC 8.3 Programme; SC 8.4 Advance Warning; SC 20.2.1 Notice of Claim; SC 20.2.2 Engineer's Notice of a time-barred Claim; Clause 14 Contract Price and Payment; Clause 19 Insurance; SC 1.1.67 definition of Programme. │ JCT Standard Building Contract With Quantities 2024 Edition (SBC/Q 2024) — cl 2.4 Date of Possession; cl 2.5 deferment of possession; cl 2.9 construction information and Contractor's master programme; cl 2.15 notice of discrepancies; cl 4.8 interim payments, due dates; cl 4.9 Interim Certificates and valuations; cl 4.11 interim and final payments, final date and amount; cl 4.12 Pay Less Notices; cl 6.12 evidence of insurance; cl 7.3 Performance Bonds and Guarantees. │ JCT SBC/Q 2016 carries the same numbering for each provision cited here. │ Editions current at publication: FIDIC Red Book 2nd Ed 2017 as reprinted 2022; JCT Standard Building Contract suite 2024, published 21 August 2024. │ Cases in this article are illustrative composites and are labelled where they appear.
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