Civil Engineering Project Management (4th Edition)

56 Civil Engineering Project Management
This consistency can be promoted if one person drafts all the documents or,
if parts are written by others, one person carefully reads through the whole
finished set of documents. An inconsistency in the documents can give rise to
a major dispute under the contract, having a serious effect on its financial outcome.
Some guiding principles are as follows.
• The layout and grouping of subjects should be logical. These need planning
out beforehand.
• Requirements for each subject should be stated clearly, in logical order,
and checked to see all aspects are covered.
• Language and punctuation should be checked to see they cannot give rise
to ambiguity.
• Legal terms and phrases should not be used.
• To define obligations the words ‘shall’ or ‘must’ (not ‘should’ or ‘is to’, etc.)
should be used.
• Quality must be precisely defined, not described as ‘best’, etc.
• Brevity should be sought by keeping to essential matters.
It is not easy to achieve an error-free specification. It is of considerable
assistance to copy model clauses that, by use and modification over many
previous contracts, have proved satisfactory in their wording. Such model
clauses can be held on computer files so they are easy to reproduce and modify
to make relevant to the particular project in hand. Copying whole texts
from a previous specification which can result in contradictory requirements
should not be adopted. Entirely new material is quite difficult to write and
will almost certainly require more than one attempt to get it satisfactory.
The specification has to tell the contractor precisely:
• the extent of the work to be carried out;
• the quality and type of materials and workmanship required;
• where necessary, the methods he is required to use, or may not use, to construct
the works.
Under the first an informative description is given of what the contractor is to
provide and all special factors, limitations, etc. applied. Under the second the
detailed requirements are set out. The extent of detail adopted should relate
to the quantity and importance of any particular type of work in relation to the
works required. Thus the specification for concrete quality may be very extensive
where much structural concrete is to be placed; but it may be quite short
if concrete is only required as bedding or thrust blocks to a pipeline. A ‘tailormade’
specification appropriate to the nature of the work in the contract
should be the aim.
Repetition of requirements should be avoided. If requirements appear in
two places, ambiguity or conflict can be caused by differences of wording.
Also there is a danger that a late alteration alters one statement but fails to
alter its repetition elsewhere.
The third of the items noted above needs careful consideration, as there may
be dangers and liabilities involved in telling the contractor how to go about his