Construction delays costs both Owners and Contractors millions of dollars each and every year. According to a Arcadis’ 2023 Global Construction Disputes Report, in 2022, the global average value of disputes increased to US $42.8 million with the highest value dispute reported was US $2 Billion.
That’s a lot costs tied up in claims, legal battles and disputes.
With so much importance put on managing costly construction delays, why don’t we have a better system to document and track delays?
I’ve been on a quite a few projects where the construction delays are only documented in the meeting minutes. Of course delays are documented on the project schedule, but there’s been really no single source of data to get a full view of delays and impacts.
In our Delay Detective – Forensic Schedule Analysis course, we have some discussion around good documentation and procedures for managing delays.
Out of those course discussions our students wanted to have a template they could use to manage project delays. And now we’re making that template free for everyone.
I’ve put together a simple construction delay log tracker template to help you keep your project delays all in one place.
So what is the essential data to capture on our delay log tracker template? Let me take you through what I think is most important to capture and document.
1) Delay ID
In case we are tracking a lot of items, it’s a good idea to assign each project delay an ID number. We can reference delays easily in other documents or systems.
2) Delay Status
Here we can track whether the delay is ongoing (still open) or closed. We could also be risk adverse and track potential delays and status them as “potential”.
3) Description
Just a 1-liner helping us to identify the delay.
4) Cause
Log the cause of the project delay. Try to be objective in your description here to craft a cause that everyone agrees with on both sides of the table.
5) Start & Finish Dates
When did the delay start and when was it officially resolved?
If you want, you can also extract the delay duration from these 2 dates. Feel free to create a new Duration column. But remember that Excel won’t adhere to your project calendar’s work and non-work days. So your Duration will be expressed as elapsed calendar days.
6) Criticality
Does this delay impact activities on the project’s Critical Path? Does it impact the project’s finish date or the Contractor’s ability to finish ontime?
7) Responsibility
Who is responsible for the project delay? Is it the Construction Owner? The Contractor? A third party? Let’s track that.
8) Categorization
Use this column to categorize your project delays. Are they compensable, eligible for a time extension, pertaining to permits? You can customize this column to categorize and track and delay type that’s important to you.
9) Resolution
Document the steps taken to resolve the delay, however it does get resolved.
10) Notes
I expect you’ll use this area the most. Here you can document any major issues related to the delay, steps, tasks, outstanding items, etc.
