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Schedule on the Report Card

Federal agencies grade contractors during and at the end of most larger contracts. The rules list the factors. One is “Technical (quality of product or service).” Another is “Schedule/timeliness,” graded on its own. Each factor gets one of five ratings, from “exceptional” to “unsatisfactory.”

The grades go into a government system called CPARS. Agencies must use them when they choose contractors for new work. A grade counts for three years after the work ends. On construction and architect-engineer contracts, it counts for six years.

When the Government Pays Late

In 1982 Congress passed the Prompt Payment Act. In most cases, a federal agency that pays a contractor late must pay interest. Under the 1982 act, a bill was due 30 days after the agency received a proper invoice, unless the contract set a date. The act also gave agencies a grace period. For most bills, no interest was due if the agency paid within 15 days after the due date.

The 1982 act said the interest must come out of the agency’s own funds for the program, not from new money. Today the contractor does not have to ask. The payment office adds the interest “automatically, without request from the contractor.” For the first half of 2026, the rate was 4 1/8 percent a year.

A Price for Every Day Late

A standard clause used in many U.S. federal construction contracts has a blank for a dollar amount. If the contractor “fails to complete the work within the time specified in the contract,” it pays that amount “for each calendar day of delay until the work is completed or accepted.” The price of each late day is set before the work begins.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation says to use such liquidated damages when “the time of delivery or timely performance is so important” that the government can expect harm from a delay. The daily rate should include what it costs the government to keep inspecting and supervising the site.

The rule says these damages “are not punitive.” The rate must be “a reasonable forecast of just compensation for the harm that is caused by late delivery.”

Fixed Time, Variable Scope

The software company 37signals, maker of Basecamp, publishes its working method as a book, Shape Up, by Ryan Singer, free to read online. Its rule is “fixed time, variable scope.” Teams work in six-week cycles, and a project gets at most six weeks. “Six weeks is long enough to finish something meaningful and short enough to feel the deadline from the beginning.”

When the work does not fit, the team cuts scope, not time. “Shipping on time means shipping something imperfect.” A project that does not ship in the time set for it “doesn’t get an extension” by default.

Two Years in Advance

Six Companies, the contractor for Boulder Dam, now Hoover Dam, had seven years from April 20, 1931, to finish the work.

At the dedication on September 30, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt praised “the energy, resourcefulness and zeal of the builders, who, under the greatest physical obstacles, have pushed this work forward to completion two years in advance of the contract requirements.”

The Santa Monica Freeway

The Northridge earthquake of 1994 brought down sections of the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles. The rebuilding contract gave the contractor, C. C. Myers, 140 days, and a bonus of $200,000 for each day the bridge opened before the deadline.

Myers finished in 66 days, 74 days ahead of schedule. The bonus came to about $14.8 million. Some reports gave $14.5 million.

When It’s Done

The studio 3D Realms announced the video game Duke Nukem Forever on April 27, 1997. For years its standard answer to the question of when the game would ship was “when it’s done.” Wired News gave it its Vaporware Award several times. The game was released in June 2011, more than 14 years later.

Real Artists Ship

At a retreat of the Macintosh team in Carmel, California, in January 1983, Steve Jobs told the team: “Real artists ship.” To ship is to deliver a finished product to customers. The account comes from team member Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote about it later. Quote Investigator concludes that Jobs popularized the expression.

Laboratory Turnaround Time

A report of the National Insitute of Health from November 2007 states:

Quality can be defined as the ability of a product or service to satisfy the needs and expectations of the customer. Laboratories have traditionally restricted discussion of quality to technical or analytical quality, focusing on imprecision and inaccuracy goals.

Clinicians, however, are interested in service quality, which encompasses total test error (imprecision and inaccuracy), availability, cost, relevance and timeliness. Clinicians desire a rapid, reliable and efficient service delivered at low cost.

Of these characteristics, timeliness is perhaps the most important to the clinician, who may be prepared to sacrifice analytical quality for faster turnaround time. This preference drives much of the proliferation of point-of-care testing seen today.

Deadlines

The word deadline was first used during the American Civil War to describe a line which, if a prisoner crossed it, could result in the prisoner’s death. Even though most deadlines today won’t end in murder, Americans still feel that correlation when talking about a deadline, and they tend to treat it like a life-or-death matter.

Deadline: a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot; a date or time before which something must be done; the time after which copy is not accepted for a particular issue of a publication. First known use was in 1864.

Examples: She worked on her composition right up until the deadline. We had to hurry to meet the deadline. The project was completed a week past its deadline. The deadline for submitting college applications is April 19th. They’re working under a deadline.

Deadlines and recovery from missed deadlines are so important to Americans that many job interviewers specifically ask applicants to describe a time that they missed a deadline and how they recovered from it. If you type missed deadline into Google, you’re immediately bombarded with self-help websites describing how to recover from a missed deadline.

In 2013, the Prince George’s County school system lost $1.4 million of state funds when it failed to approve school construction contracts within their two year deadline. Although the school district was very close to approving these contracts, no extension was given, and the money had to be returned.