07-Str-B2 · May 2014
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
National Examinations — May 2014 — 07-Str-B2 Management of Construction. Three hours, closed book; candidates may use one of the two approved calculators (Casio or Sharp). The paper prints six questions of equal value (20 marks each) and states that any five questions constitute a complete paper, only the first five appearing in the answer book being marked. Candidates are urged to submit a clear statement of any interpretive assumptions with their answers. All six questions are worked below, because this set is intended as a study resource rather than as a single exam sitting.
Reference texts: RSMeans, Building Construction Cost Data — the "How to Use the Cost Data" front matter, which defines daily output, labour-hours, bare costs and the Total Incl. O&P column used in Question 1; Halpin, D.W. & Senior, B.A., Construction Management (4th ed., Wiley) — unit-price estimating, crew balancing, labour relations and construction safety; Hegazy, T., Computer-Based Construction Project Management (Prentice Hall) — precedence networks with SS/FS/FF relationships and lags, which is exactly the notation of Question 2; Hendrickson, C. & Au, T., Project Management for Construction (2nd ed., Carnegie Mellon) — scheduling and cost control; Sullivan, W.G., Wicks, E.M. & Koelling, C.P., Engineering Economy (17th ed., Pearson) — present-worth analysis and the maximum-justified-investment problem of Question 4; Canadian Construction Documents Committee, CCDC 2 — Stipulated Price Contract (2020), General Conditions 6.5 (delays) and 6.6 (claims for a change in Contract Price); Goldsmith, I. & Heintzman, T.G., Goldsmith on Canadian Building Contracts (5th ed., Thomson Reuters) — delay and notice law in Canada; AACE International, Recommended Practice 29R-03: Forensic Schedule Analysis — the but-for and windows methods named in Question 5; British Columbia Labour Relations Code, RSBC 1996 c. 244 — certification, bargaining units and the construction-industry provisions behind Question 3; WorkSafeBC, Occupational Health and Safety Regulation (Parts 4, 8, 11, 18 and 20) and the BC Workers Compensation Act — the prime-contractor duty and the traffic-control, fall-protection and hazardous-substance rules behind Question 6.
Check — two readings taken from the printed page. The RS Means extract in Question 1 prints two cells as question marks; both are recovered below from the crew table, and the recovered labour-hour figure is checked against the printed $27 labour column before it is used. Two arrows leave the right-hand edge of activity D and turn vertically to reach E and C; they are read here as ordinary finish-to-start links, which is the only reading consistent with the drawing and with the fact that every unlabelled arrow on the sheet carries no lag.
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
Delay analysis proceeds in two stages that the four pairs in this question map onto exactly. The first stage classifies a delay to decide what, if anything, the contractor is entitled to; the second establishes causation, that is, whether the delay actually moved the completion date. The classifications are not alternatives to one another but successive filters, and an event must pass each in turn.
Excusable versus non-excusable. An excusable delay is one caused by an event outside the contractor's control and not attributable to its fault or negligence — owner-directed changes, late or defective owner-supplied information, differing site conditions, abnormal weather beyond the contract's stated allowance, strikes, or a governmental act. Its consequence is an extension of the Contract Time: the contractor is relieved of liquidated damages for the period of the extension. A non-excusable delay is one the contractor caused or bore the risk of — late mobilization, insufficient manning, subcontractor default, rework of defective work, failure to procure long-lead items on time. It carries no extension, and the owner may assess liquidated damages or, in an extreme case, require acceleration at the contractor's cost. Under CCDC 2 the mechanism is General Condition 6.5, which sets out the grounds for extension and, critically, a notice requirement: the contractor must give notice within a stated period of the event, and Canadian courts have enforced those notice provisions strictly. The classification therefore has a procedural dimension as well as a substantive one — an otherwise excusable delay can be lost by failing to give notice.
Compensable versus non-compensable. Excusability answers only the time question. Whether money follows depends on whose risk the event was. A compensable delay is excusable and caused by the owner or someone for whom the owner is responsible: a change order, late site access, late review of shop drawings, interference by the owner's other contractors. The contractor is entitled both to an extension and to its extended general conditions, site and head-office overhead, and in some circumstances lost productivity. A non-compensable delay is excusable but not the owner's fault — abnormal weather, a general strike, an epidemic, an act of a public authority. These are the classic “time but no money” events: the risk of the occurrence is shared, with the owner absorbing the schedule consequence and the contractor absorbing its own cost. The distinction matters enormously in practice because most disputes are not about whether an event happened but about which of these two boxes it falls into, and the contract wording — particularly force-majeure and weather clauses — usually decides it.
Concurrent versus non-concurrent. Delays are concurrent when two or more independent delays, one the owner's responsibility and one the contractor's, affect the completion date over the same or overlapping periods. A non-concurrent delay stands alone, and its effect on the completion date can be attributed cleanly to one party. Concurrency is the central battleground of delay claims because the ordinary Canadian outcome is that the contractor obtains an extension of time but no compensation for the concurrent period: the owner cannot levy liquidated damages for a period it also delayed, and the contractor cannot recover overhead for a period it would have lost anyway. Two refinements matter. True concurrency requires that both delays independently affect the critical path; a delay to an activity with float is not concurrent no matter when it occurs. And pacing must be distinguished from concurrency — a contractor that deliberately slows a trade because an owner delay has already made the original pace pointless is pacing, a reasonable response, not an independent contractor-caused delay, provided the decision was contemporaneous and can be evidenced.
But-for versus windows analysis. These are the two dominant families of forensic technique, and AACE International's Recommended Practice 29R-03 catalogues both. A but-for analysis, also called collapsed as-built or subtractive modelling, starts from the as-built schedule — what actually happened — and removes the delay events attributed to one party to see what the completion date would have been but for those events; the difference is that party's contribution. It is a single retrospective model, relatively quick, and it needs a reliable as-built record more than a reliable baseline. Its weaknesses are that it is inherently hypothetical, that the result depends heavily on which events the analyst chooses to extract, and that it handles concurrency poorly because collapsing one party's delays in isolation can produce an unrealistic schedule. A windows analysis, also called contemporaneous period analysis or time-impact analysis depending on the variant, divides the project into successive periods — typically at monthly updates or at points where the critical path shifts — and within each window compares the schedule at the start with what actually occurred, identifying the controlling delay in that period alone before rolling forward. It follows the way the critical path genuinely migrated over the life of the project, deals with concurrency naturally because both parties' delays appear in the same window, and is generally the method courts and boards find most persuasive. Its costs are that it demands a validated baseline and a complete series of contemporaneous schedule updates, and that it is substantially more expensive and slower to prepare. In short, but-for is retrospective and hypothetical, windows is contemporaneous and dynamic; where the schedule record supports it, the windows approach is preferred, and the practical decision is usually driven by the quality of the schedule documentation the project actually kept.
