What happens when a project risk materialises — and what is the notice trap?
It stops being a risk and becomes an event — a variation, a delay, a claim — and it starts a clock. The trap is that the register lives beside the contract machinery rather than connected to it, so the project correctly predicted the risk, watched it happen, and served nothing.
The most expensive risk on any project
It is not the one you failed to foresee. It is the one you foresaw, wrote down, discussed at three review meetings — and then failed to notify when it actually happened.
Because that one comes with proof that you knew. Your own register is the document establishing that the risk was identified, assessed and owned. And the entitlement that should have followed died in a drawer, inside a notice window, while everybody was busy dealing with the consequences.
The clock is short and it is real
Under FIDIC 2017 the notice window for a claim is 28 days, and it operates as a genuine time bar rather than a formality — miss it and the entitlement can be lost outright, however meritorious it was.
And the clock starts when the event occurs or when you became aware of it, not when the project gets around to assessing it. Which means the busiest, most chaotic period — the one immediately after a risk lands — is exactly the period during which the notice must be served.
The structural fix
Connect the register to the machinery. A realised risk should become an event with a notice obligation attached, tracked to service — not a status change on a spreadsheet that lives on a different drive from the contract.
The register does not need to be cleverer. It needs to be plugged in. A risk register sitting beside the contract administration process, rather than inside it, will faithfully record that you predicted the thing that then cost you money, and will do nothing whatsoever to help you recover it.
References
- FIDIC 2017 — the 28-day claim-notice window as a genuine time bar. Anchored on /modules/site-instructions/.
Zepth is the construction project delivery platform — it runs construction, procurement and asset management on one record, and does the work: reading the drawings, reviewing the submittals, matching the invoices and flagging the risks, with a human sign-off on anything consequential.
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