Project Management Failures: How Poor Planning Becomes the Root of Claims

Jinoy Viswan
Nov 1
5 min read

1. Introduction: The Hidden Cost of Mismanagement

Every major construction dispute begins long before a notice of claim is issued.It begins with a failure of planning.

Contracts are drafted, teams mobilised, and execution begins, but somewhere along the way, project management loses control of time, scope, and cost. The result is familiar: unapproved variations, misaligned schedules, missing documentation, and teams working from outdated drawings.

These are not technical failures. They are management failures, and their consequences can devastate both contractors and owners.

At Aegis, we routinely see that when disputes reach arbitration, the issue is rarely one bad event. It is a chain of procedural neglect that began at project initiation.

This article examines how poor project management manifests in EPC and lump-sum contracts, why it destroys entitlement, and how applying recognised management frameworks, PMI, CII, and AACE standards can protect both time and cost.

2. The Foundation: What Project Management Really Means

A construction project is not a static sequence of activities; it is a living system of decisions.Project management is therefore not administration, it is the disciplined application of foresight.

In EPC contracts, it encompasses everything from early engineering through commissioning and turnover. According to PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), it integrates five key process groups: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closeout.

When these processes collapse, the consequences are measurable:

Scope drift: Poor definition leads to uncontrolled design growth.
Scheduling failure: Baselines are developed late or never updated.
Weak controls: Cost reports lag reality, allowing overruns to accumulate.
Ineffective change management: Variations proceed without proper cause–effect assessment.

A contractor’s procedural strength is not proven by the size of its organisation, but by how consistently it manages these fundamentals.

3. The Contractual Framework: Where Project Management Lives

Project management obligations are not advisory, they are contractual duties.Modern EPC and LSTK contracts routinely include detailed management deliverables such as:

Project Execution Plan and supporting management plans
Staffing, safety, and quality programmes
CPM schedules (Level 1–4) and update requirements
Change control and cost control procedures
Risk and communication management plans

Failure to meet these deliverables is not a technicality.It can nullify entitlement to extensions of time or cost recovery.

A contractor who fails to submit a compliant schedule or progress report forfeits the ability to prove delay. Conversely, an owner who fails to review or approve submittals promptly may lose the ability to defend against a time claim.

Aegis Insight: Entitlement lives and dies in paperwork. What is not planned, submitted, and approved in time cannot later be proven.

4. The Industry Benchmark: Accepted Standards of Management

No contract can predict every circumstance. That is why tribunals and experts often look to “accepted industry practice” when contracts are silent.

Institutions such as PMI and the Construction Industry Institute (CII) define recognised project management disciplines that form this external benchmark.

Key Areas of Project Management (as recognised by PMI and CII):

Integration and Scope Management: Ensuring alignment between design and deliverables.
Time and Cost Management: Maintaining logical, evidence-based schedules and budgets.
Change Control: Evaluating and documenting all variations through formal logs.
Risk Management: Identifying threats and opportunities at every project phase.
Communication Management: Structured reporting and documentation control.
Safety and Quality Assurance: Embedded through planning, not inspection.

When project management fails in these areas, causation becomes traceable and in tribunal analysis, traceable means accountable.

5. Assessing Conformance: How Failures Are Proven

In disputes, poor management is never assessed by opinion. It is proven through records.

Forensic reviewers measure conformance using deliverables and contemporaneous documents:

Deliverable	Typical Evidence of Compliance	Indicative Failure
Project Execution Plan	Timely submission and updates with clear objectives and resources	Missing or outdated plan; no evidence of updates
CPM Schedule	Logical, fully linked baseline and monthly updates	No baseline; updates not maintained; broken logic
Progress Reports	Monthly narratives with data-supported forecasts	Vague or inconsistent reporting; omission of risks
Change Control Logs	Formal tracking of impacts and approvals	Unrecorded variations; missing cause-effect linkage
RFIs / Correspondence	Prompt response records	Delayed or unacknowledged queries; confusion of scope

Failure to maintain these creates a chain of procedural weakness that destroys the credibility of any subsequent claim.

Tribunal reality: When contemporaneous records contradict the contractor’s narrative, the claim collapses.

6. From Deficiency to Damage: Linking Management Failures to Delay

In delay and disruption cases, the tribunal’s task is not simply to find what went wrong, it is to determine who controlled the event.

Poor project management often manifests in three ways:

Planning Failure: The schedule is produced late or lacks critical-path logic.
Execution Failure: The contractor fails to follow its own schedule or apply recovery measures.
Documentation Failure: The contemporaneous evidence contradicts its stated position.

Example:A contractor develops a procurement plan using incorrect specifications. The owner rejects it near the review deadline, requiring correction. If the activity sits on the critical path, delay responsibility rests with the contractor—not the owner who flagged the error.

This “cause-and-effect” reasoning forms the core of forensic assessment.It is not emotion or perception: it is logic rooted in records.

7. Cost Consequences: The Financial Signature of Poor Management

Once delay is established, poor project management translates directly into measurable cost impacts: idle labour, extended overheads, inefficiency, and disruption.

The analytical process follows three evidentiary steps:

Entitlement: Was there a contractual or management failure by the other party?
Causation: Did that failure cause delay or cost growth?
Quantification: Can those costs be isolated and verified through records?

Without all three, a claim becomes speculative.

Aegis Insight: Every unsupported hour in a claim is a reflection of an unsupported decision in the field.

8. Real-World Lessons from Tribunal Cases

Across dozens of disputes analysed at Aegis, recurring patterns appear:

Schedules prepared after the fact: The most common fatal flaw.
Commissioning plans not submitted in time: Leading to delays and lost EOT entitlement.
Work built from unapproved drawings: Resulting in rework and counterclaims.
Progress reports that contradict field logs: Undermining credibility before the tribunal.

In each case, the failure was procedural, not physical. The system of management collapsed before the structure did.

9. The Aegis Approach: Turning Procedure into Protection

Sound project management is both a shield and a sword.

When disputes arise, the side that can demonstrate:

compliance with contract procedures,
conformance with recognised industry standards, and
clarity in contemporaneous documentation,

is the side that will prevail.

At Aegis, our forensic assessments combine contract analysis, delay quantification, and management evaluation to determine how failures in planning, execution, and documentation translate into liability.

We treat project management not as an administrative function, but as a causation framework, the backbone of entitlement itself.