First: figure out if it even matters
The instinct when something slips is to panic and expedite. Don't. Not yet. First ask whether the delayed task is on your critical path. If it has slack, a delay may cost you nothing and deserves no scramble. If it's on the critical path, the finish date is moving and you need to act.
This one question saves enormous wasted effort. Contractors who don't think in critical-path terms treat every delay as a five-alarm fire and burn out their crews expediting things that had float to spare.
Second: document the cause immediately
The moment a delay hits, record what happened, when, and why, in real time, not from memory three weeks later. A dated note, a photo, an email confirming the backordered delivery. This costs you two minutes and it's the difference between a defensible extension request and a he-said-she-said.
Delays fall into rough buckets that determine who absorbs them:
- Owner-caused. Late selections, unpaid draws, scope changes, access problems. These typically justify a time extension and often a cost recovery.
- Excusable, no-fault. Weather, permit delays, supplier backorders outside your control. Usually justify a time extension but not extra pay, depending on your contract.
- Contractor-caused. Your sub no-showed, your sequencing error, your ordering mistake. You own these.
Knowing which bucket you're in tells you whether to eat the delay, ask for time, or ask for time *and* money.
Third: recover the schedule
If the finish date is genuinely at risk, you recover by compressing, and you compress the critical path, not the whole job. Speeding up tasks with slack does nothing for your completion date. Two standard levers:
- Fast-tracking. Overlap tasks that were planned in sequence. Start exterior finishes while interior work continues. Lower cost, higher coordination risk.
- Crashing. Add resources to critical tasks. A second crew, overtime, a rush order. Costs money, so spend it only where it actually buys calendar time, on the critical path.
Recovery is a decision, not a reflex. Before you crash a task, confirm it's critical and that the time you buy is worth what you're paying.
Fourth: recover the cost when it's not your fault
Here's where schedule and money meet. An owner-caused delay, a homeowner who took three weeks to pick tile then changed the layout, often carries real cost: your crew's standby time, a re-mobilization, extended general conditions. That cost doesn't recover itself. If the delay came with a scope change, it belongs in a change order. If it's purely time, it belongs in a documented extension request tied to your contract.
The contractors who lose money on delays are usually the ones who *absorb* owner-caused costs silently to keep the peace, then wonder where the margin went. Document it, price it, and put it in front of the client while the cause is fresh, not at close-out when it looks like you're padding the bill.
Reset the plan and move on
Once you've recovered what you can, update the master schedule to reflect the new reality and roll it into your look-ahead. A schedule that still shows the old finish date after a known slip is worse than no schedule. It trains everyone to distrust your dates. Reset honestly, communicate the new date, and keep running.
Delays are a project-management problem, not just a calendar problem
The reason delay handling belongs inside a connected construction project management system is that a delay touches the schedule *and* the budget *and* the billing all at once. A slipped critical task moves your final draw; an owner-caused delay creates a recoverable cost; a change-order delay needs to flow to both the timeline and the invoice.
TradesMetrics keeps the schedule, the budget, and change orders on one job, so when a delay hits you can see the timeline impact, capture the recoverable cost, and turn it into a change order without re-entering anything. See how delays flow from schedule to money in one place.