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

Every chapter ends with a page from the mentor’s notebook, a short summary of what the chapter teaches. The book closes with a 47-term glossary, a lessons-by-chapter index and three ready-to-use tools: a one-page summary template, an Engineer’s programme-review checklist and a list of lessons learned.

For planners and schedulers, project managers, construction managers, engineers, quantity surveyors, contract and commercial managers, and students of construction and project management. And for anyone who has ever been asked to hold the dates.