200 Questions & Answers: Project Appraisal, Contract Procurement, Tendering, Cost Management, Claims, Variation, Dispute handling and other Post Contract Administration - Prepared by Thilak Siva

Having basic knowledge of the contract is vital, the book starts with a set of questions on the general law of contract. Accordingly, the questions are arranged in the following sections.

• Contract Law
• Project Appraisal
• Pretender Cost Management
• Tendering
• Contract Procurement
• Understanding of Commercial Documents
• Post Contract Management
• Claims and Dispute Resolution

Thousands of further issues can be discussed under each section. However, this piece of work only provides a basic guideline that is useful for industry practice as well as for the preparation of the Assessment of Professional Competence of various Professional Bodies, which represents the built environment.

The Standards Forms of Contracts do not always provide straightforward solutions to all the practical issues being encountered, and therefore, the parties might need to go for negotiation and some sort of compromise. The issues that the parties cannot resolve themselves require third-party intervention by means of Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanisms or litigation. For the sake of discussion, mostly FIDIC Standard Contracts and the UK Case Laws are used in this book. Thus, the users should focus on the concept and the principles rather than merely memorizing the Clauses, Case Laws and the contractual positions discussed in this book. With the understanding of such principles, the professionals who deal with the contractual issues in their real life should scrutinize their respective contracts and the legal systems under which their contracts are governed.

Since the FIDIC Standard Forms of Contracts are referred to for the sake of discussion in many places, the wording of ‘Employer’ is used to denote the client of the project. Also, the wording ‘Engineer’ is used to denote the entity (consultant) who administrates the contract on behalf of the Employer.