After seven years in the Azerbaijani mountains and a year managing claims in Manila, I arrived in Kandy in 2018 expecting another difficult project in a difficult environment. What I found instead — at least in one crucial respect — was something I had not experienced before and have not experienced since: an Engineer who genuinely wanted the project to succeed.
That sounds like it should be the baseline. It is not always. And the contrast with what I had known before made the lesson all the more vivid.
The road from the Philippines
The Kandy project — rehabilitation of the city's storm water drainage network — was awarded in January 2018, with a commencement date set for April. I had been in Manila since 2017 as Claims Manager for Ludwig Pfeiffer Philippines, managing a sewerage project in South Pasig while simultaneously keeping one eye on the final stages of Yardimli, which I was still overseeing remotely and visiting when the works required it.
I had been involved in preparing the Kandy bid before I left for Manila. When the contract was awarded, I knew the project well on paper — the scope, the contract conditions, the Pink Book framework, the challenges of rehabilitating an underground drainage network in a functioning city centre. What I did not know yet was what it would feel like to manage it on the ground.
After Manila — a megacity of twenty million people, traffic that moved in geological time, the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from density — Kandy felt immediately right. Large enough to have everything you need. Small enough to move through it with ease. A city that carries its history visibly, where colonial architecture sits alongside Buddhist temples and the lake at the centre holds the whole place together. I was taken by it almost immediately. I remain taken by it.
Regrouping under threat of termination
The first months of the project had not gone well. Progress was slow — slower than the programme required — and after eight months, the Contractor's Representative at the time had to leave due to illness. I stepped in to take over the project.
The Employer was threatening termination. The atmosphere was not comfortable. But I had something valuable: two colleagues from the Manila project who joined me in Kandy and who understood, precisely, how I work and how I think. In this profession, that kind of alignment is genuinely rare and genuinely precious. When you are under pressure, the last thing you need is to explain your reasoning from first principles every time you need to make a decision.
We regrouped. The original plan had been to work sequentially — one tunnel at a time, across three separate drainage systems. We changed the approach entirely: two shifts, three simultaneous work fronts. The pace changed visibly and quickly.
But the most important decision we made in those first weeks was not about the programme. It was about documentation. Under the threat of termination, every document, every notice, every updated work programme was controlled with precision. Not defensively — strategically. We were not preparing for a dispute. We were ensuring that if any delay occurred for reasons outside our control, we would be ready to demonstrate it clearly, completely, and without the need to reconstruct anything after the fact.
What good collaboration looks like
I have worked with many Engineers across many projects and many contract forms. The Engineer on the Kandy project was unlike any I have encountered before or since.
This is not a small observation. Under FIDIC conditions, the Engineer holds significant power — over payment, over time, over the acceptance or rejection of claims. The relationship between Contractor and Engineer can be adversarial, transactional, or — in the best cases — genuinely collaborative. In Kandy, it was the latter.
The Engineer understood that the project's success depended on both sides pulling in the same direction. He engaged with our notices before they were formally issued — not to undermine them, but to understand the situation and respond constructively. When we flagged a delay event, his instinct was not to dispute it but to ask what could be done to minimise its impact. When we submitted a claim for Extension of Time, he processed it efficiently because the record was clear and he had been part of building it.
"It takes two to tango. A notice of claim should be a warning, not a declaration of war — and the right Engineer knows the difference."
The results spoke for themselves. Despite everything that followed — and much did follow — the trajectory of the project changed. The delay began to be recovered. Progress became visible. The threat of termination receded.
Easter Sunday, COVID, and the rain
April 2019. We were working through the project, making steady progress. On Easter Sunday, a coordinated terrorist attack struck several hotels and churches in Sri Lanka, killing over 250 people. It was one of the deadliest attacks in the country's history. Construction works were suspended. The country went into a period of emergency.
A notice went out the same day.
There were other delay events over the course of the project — each one noticed immediately, with full details, with an assessment of the likely impact on the programme. The Engineer received these notices and processed them. The record grew cleaner and more coherent with each submission. By the time any event became a formal claim, the groundwork had already been done.
Then, in late 2019 — approximately six weeks before the projected completion date — we received an instruction for an additional variation. The scope required a minimum of three months of additional work, and it needed to be done in dry conditions. We were heading into the monsoon season.
Within days of that instruction, Sri Lanka went into lockdown due to COVID-19. Six weeks of suspension followed.
When the lockdown lifted, we returned to the tunnels. But the window had closed. We were now in the rainy season, and three months of additional works became six. The tunnels filled with water during heavy rainfall. Progress that was straightforward in dry conditions became slow and technically demanding in wet ones.
Clean as a whistle
The Extension of Time claim that emerged from this sequence of events was, by any measure, one of the cleaner claims I have prepared. Not because the situation was simple — it was not. But because every element of it had been anticipated, documented and linked to the programme in real time.
Every notice issued had included an assessment of how long the delay event was expected to affect the programme. When the project was completed, those assessments were compared against what actually happened. In almost every case, they matched — in some cases to the day. The cause-and-effect chain was not something we had to argue. It was visible in the record, event by event, notice by notice, programme update by programme update.
The project was completed several days ahead of the Extended completion date. That is the outcome of a well-managed claim — not just the recovery of time and cost, but the vindication of a methodology. When the record is built correctly, the claim almost writes itself.
What Kandy taught me
Yardimli taught me resilience, strategy, and the long view. Kandy taught me something different: what becomes possible when both sides of a contract actually want the same thing.
Construction projects fail — or become more painful than they need to be — not only because of technical problems or difficult conditions or unfair contracts. They fail because the people on either side of the contract stop working together and start working against each other. Notices become accusations. Claims become battles. The project becomes a battlefield where the real casualty is the outcome.
In Kandy, I saw the alternative clearly. A notice of claim, discussed between the Contractor and the Engineer before it was formally issued — not to dilute it, but to ensure it was accurate and actionable. An Engineer who understood that helping the Contractor document a delay correctly served the project's interests, not just the Contractor's. A shared understanding that the record existed to reflect reality, not to construct a narrative.
That approach reduced the risk of dispute, accelerated the processing of claims, and — I am convinced — was a significant factor in the project being completed despite a terrorist attack, a global pandemic, and a monsoon season that arrived exactly when it was least welcome.
I left Sri Lanka with a completed project, a clean claim, and a deep affection for a country that stays with you. A place where you can step two centuries back in time without leaving the city centre, where the pace of life insists on something slower and more considered. Where the lake in the centre of Kandy holds the whole place together, unhurried, regardless of what is happening around it.
I will go back.