Category 03

Procurement and contracts

Routes, tender lists, JCT and NEC, bid analysis and where liability actually lands.

Payment terms and what they do to cash flow

Payment terms look administrative until a facility drawdown cycle and a payment cycle fall out of step, at which point they are everything.

Nobody signs a standard form any more. The deal is in the amendments, and they arrive as an appendix nobody prices.

Three different instruments protect against three different things. Clients frequently hold one and believe they are covered for all of them.

A qualification is a bidder telling you what they have not priced. It is the most useful page in the return and the least read.

A liquidated damages rate that nobody can explain is a rate that will not be enforced, and the client is left proving actual loss instead.

Both forms work. They fail in different ways, and they fail when a client picks the one their team is not resourced to run.

Design and build is chosen for certainty. Whether it delivers any depends almost entirely on a document most clients never read closely.

Four bids for the same scheme are almost never bids for the same scope. Until the differences are stripped out, the totals are not comparable.

The decision is usually taken by whoever speaks first in the meeting. It deserves better, because it sets how much leverage you will have for the...