Site Instructions

Why site instructions are critical

Change is where project money moves, and the site instruction is how change enters the project. Scope change is among the most frequent causes of claims worldwide — HKA’s CRUX research across 2,200-plus projects puts it at roughly 28% of them — and change orders commonly run to around a tenth of contract value on commercial work.

The core commercial mechanic is one every site engineer should be able to recite: comply now, argue later — but paper first. The duty to proceed with a properly issued instruction is close to absolute. The right to be paid for proceeding rides entirely on the notice trail.

Under FIDIC 2017 that trail has two distinct steps, and confusing them is how entitlement is lost. First: a contractor who considers an instruction to constitute a variation must give notice before commencing the work. Second, and separately: any claim for additional time or money must be noticed within 28 days of becoming aware of the event. That 28-day window is a condition precedent — a genuine time bar. Comply silently, and you have made a donation.

The role of instructions in project performance

• Authority is checkable — so check it. Under FIDIC the Engineer may delegate to a resident engineer or assistants, but only by written notice, and key powers are commonly excluded from that delegation. In GCC practice the Engineer’s authority is typically fettered further still, with Particular Conditions requiring the Employer’s prior approval for any instruction carrying cost or time effect. Consultant site staff issue “instructions” they lack the authority to give as variations every day of the week — and contractors execute them, and only afterwards discover that the money conversation has no foundation. Verify the delegation before you price anything at zero.

• The SI-versus-variation question is the money question. Some instructions are genuinely neutral clarifications. Many are not: they change scope, sequence, quality or method, and are variations in fact regardless of what the paperwork calls them. These constructive variations are a classic dispute seed. US practice actually encodes the distinction — an ASI is limited to changes carrying no cost or time adjustment, and anything beyond that needs a change order. The discipline that follows: every instruction gets impact-assessed on receipt, and the impact flag is what drives the notice.

• Verbal instructions have to be converted. Under JCT an oral instruction has no immediate effect: the contractor confirms it in writing, and it takes effect if the architect does not dissent within the stated period. FIDIC 2017 goes further, treating an instruction as written by definition — so an unconfirmed verbal direction has no contractual status at all. And yet verbal directions happen daily on every site on earth. The habit of confirming everything, immediately, in writing is the cheapest claims insurance that exists.

• Watch the creep. Dozens of individually “minor” instructions aggregate into real scope leakage. Each one sits below the variation radar on its own; together they are a disruption claim — and that claim will only succeed if the register can show the cumulative record. Sophisticated commercial teams flag cumulative instruction value monthly, precisely because no single instruction ever triggers the alarm.

What happens without instruction discipline

The chains are depressingly standard. A verbal instruction is given. No confirmation is written. The work is done. No written instruction exists — and the variation claim fails on the writing requirement alone, before anyone has even argued about the money.

Or: an instruction is issued, the contractor does not spot that it is a variation, work starts, and both windows close behind them — the before-commencement notice and then the 28 days. Time-barred. Margin gone. Relationship soured. And at project end, claims consultants are hired to fight a weak global claim assembled from a record that was never kept.

Every step in both chains is a records failure before it is a commercial one. That is the entire argument for running instructions on a register rather than a notepad.

How Zepth runs site instructions

Every instruction lives in a numbered register with its issuer, that issuer’s delegated-authority status, the description, the linked drawings and photographs — and, critically, cost and time impact flags with their notice status attached.

An impact-flagged instruction triggers the variation and claim-notice workflows with the contractual clocks visible and running. The register is the contemporaneous system adjudicators actually credit, and it is maintained as a by-product of working rather than as an act of heroism at project end.