No good deed goes unpunished

UAE Chapter President and Chartered engineer, Harry Roberts, tell us the importance of reading the full contract and how it can benefit you in the long run.

 

I recall meeting a friend of mine a few years ago staring gloomily into his beer in a pub. He kept muttering an acronym I hadn’t come across before:

RTFC

Turned out it stood for “Read The Full Contract”. My friend, for understandable reasons, was using a more Anglo-Saxon version but I’ll leave that to your imagination.

My friend had taken over a major project three weeks before we met in the pub. He explained that he had just discovered, he was a project controls guy by the way, that one of his company’s engineering teams, to help a project along, had been undertaking work outside the contract.

For two years.

A lot of man-hours later the margin on the contract was virtually wiped out and he was trying to figure out how, after the event, he would have any chance of getting the money out of the client. The lawyers were also getting a bit exercised about what additional, uncovered risks the company might be carrying.

Sound familiar? I’m not surprised. As engineers, we love solving problems and we are, for the most part, agreeable, helpful types who don’t go around causing too many waves. And that’s one of the ways we frequently come unstuck commercially.

Some scripts from this particular play-book, on multi-party projects, are:

“Can you just take a look at this for us?”

“I know you need the x-refs for this drawing set but you’re pretty good with this stuff so just do what you can.”

“The other guys will do the clash detection; I know they said they’d give you their BIM model but just give us some 2D drawings and we’ll take it from there.”

“Look, the surge calculations on these fire water pipes were supposed to be done by XXX but it turns out they don’t have the right software. Can you run them quickly and give us confirmation on the loads – we’re running some pump tests on Monday?”

No problems with any of the above, right? Yeah, right!

There is potential budget, schedule and risk issues in all of the above that can lead to commercial losses. Pandora’s box doesn’t even come close.

As soon as you volunteer to do something that is not covered by the contract you are, from a risk perspective, out in no man’s land commercially and legally; and you’re a prime target for getting hit in any ensuing cross-fire.

Take the surge calculations example by way of illustration. Firstly, they are not part of the contract you signed up for so are not (a), in the budget and (b), not covered in your risk coverage either in the price build up or possibly under your insurance. Furthermore, because you are coming to this cold, you don’t know the real reasons why XXX hasn’t done the calculations and you have no idea, unless you ask the relevant questions, as to the context or scope boundaries within which you are being asked to undertake the calculations.

But, being an eager-to-help type, you run the surge calcs, based purely on the data your client gave you, and hand them over attached to an email that says “Dear X, here you go. Good luck on Monday.”

The guys run the pump tests and it all goes well. No-one thinks anymore about it, the pump and pipeworks get signed off, and everyone goes home.

Two years later, there’s a fire emergency and the pump cranks into action and blows a section of pipe off the wall where there are four 90-degree bends to get round a structural column. Thankfully, no one got hurt in the blow-out and the duplicate pipe feed kept the water flowing to the hydrants.

Nonetheless, there’s a load of damage to the pipework, anchors, and wall and until the damage is fixed, and the repairs re-tested, that particular building location is out of service. The lawyers warn you that there could be a court case out of this so you go back to your original work and check it. It looks good and checks out, but one of your colleagues notices that nowhere on the calc sheets, or in the covering email, did you state the assumptions you were making about what “others” should have provided to render your calcs valid.

You had assumed, but not written down anywhere, that others would:

• Provide surge relief valves within the scope of the pump provision (as was usual practice in all such designs you had been involved with before)
• Write into the maintenance schedule a regular check on the valves to ensure function on demand (this is a safety system so there was a hazard log being run)
• Provide pipe anchors and mountings to handle the surge loads you had calculated
• Specify pipe joints that would handle the surge loads

What actually happened was the surge valves were provided but never checked after installation. The pipe anchors and mountings were good for the loads you had calculated but, when the surge valves failed on demand, they couldn’t handle the actual load.

What happens next is down to the relative assertiveness and smarts of the competing corporate lawyers and, apart from providing evidence, you’re out of the loop and losing sleep until the decision comes down.

You stepped outside the boundaries of your contracted scope, to do a quick favour and solve a problem, and two years later end up facing possible court action.

Next time, and every time, the best thing to do is:

RTFC

Then scope out the additional work required and information needed, ask for a variation to the contract, price it accordingly, have it authorised, state your assumptions, do the work and get a good night’s sleep.

It’s always worth remembering that, more often than not, no good deed goes unpunished.