When a project is months behind, the first instinct is to act: add shifts, add crews, resequence something. Acting before you know where the time went usually burns money without buying time. A recovery that works starts with thirty days of disciplined truth-finding. This is how we run them.
Week 1: establish the real status
- Get the native schedule file, the last three updates and the baseline. PDFs are not enough.
- Walk the site with the superintendents and verify progress on critical and near-critical work. Measured, not reported.
- Set a clean data date and status the schedule to it, even if the result is uncomfortable.
Week 2: find the real critical path
- Run the logic checks. Remove or document hard constraints that are holding dates artificially.
- Trace the longest path from the data date to the finish and confirm it with a critical path test.
- Compare against the baseline window by window to see where the time was lost and who controlled each loss.
Week 3: price the options
Every recovery option has a cost and a time value. Acceleration, resequencing, scope deferral, a phased turnover, a revised milestone. We model each one in the schedule and put the days gained beside the dollars spent. Some options buy time cheaply. Others cost a fortune and gain nothing because they sit off the critical path. Leadership needs to see that difference in one table.
Week 4: commit and protect the record
- Agree the recovery schedule with the team that has to build it. A plan the field does not believe is not a plan.
- Rebaseline only if the contract allows it, and document the change so the original record survives.
- Keep contemporaneous records of the causes of delay. If the recovery leads to a claim, the analysis will rest on those records.
What recovery is not
A recovery schedule that compresses every remaining duration by fifteen percent is not a recovery. It is the same optimism that caused the problem, with a new date on it. Real recovery changes logic, resources or scope, and the narrative says exactly which.
Test which of your recovery options actually buy time in the Controls Lab, or bring us in for recovery planning. When the time loss needs to be explained to the other side, our delay analysis work starts from the same record.
