Design modifications, variation orders, delays, misinterpretations, substitutions of comparable materials, and changed site conditions are among an almost infinite list of events hanging around our projects ready to take us for a ride on disputes and endless negotiations.

Fortunately enough, project managers can now count on a series of well-engineered management tools to prevent undesirable situations becoming a project disruption, a dispute, and most likely a claim.

Unlike in the past, these management tools are now being applied right from the inception of the project creating a parallel dimension during the project life cycle to protect us against damaging and usually costly constraints.

The real novelty on this matter is that of practicing full project management at earlier stages of development and integrating tools usually given low priorities by project team members.

Disputes and claims can definitively be avoided. There is no reason to think otherwise when we have excellent tools such as:

• Project Life Cycle Analysis;
• Constructability;
• Value Engineering Analysis;
• Critical Path Method;
• Just in Time Procurement;
• Modern contracting Administrative Strategies; and
• A good cost and schedule control system criteria.

Although these tools have been available to all us for quite a long time, they have never been successfully applied to project management due to conventional management wrong belief requiring them to be used only on limited basis at later stages of the project life cycle.

Modern project management is not only integrating these tools in all the stages of the project life cycle, but it is emphasizing their priority as decision-making tools and indispensable requirements to guarantee accomplishment of targets and disputes prevention.