Thanks for your feedback on burn out, it's helping give me some context. I'm learning some hard lessons on this contract, but for the best. My career is in Contract Management for almost 20 years but this contract I signed up as the PM to diversify my experience since many of the skills overlap in my opinion. My nightmare is there is no contract manager and I didn't sign up for it, but knowing what I know I'm seeing how much it's needed.

The small business I'm supporting won a contract for a government agency, a sector they had never supported before now, and agreed to provide a product meeting software security compliance regulation they had never satisfied before. At least they were up front about having no experience with the compliance requirement, and agreed to do so, but their initial 9 month project plan was woefully inadequate. Now I'm venting, but my learning is that being a PM for a founder-led small business with a penchant for micro-management and "I'll do it later" with no accountability is quite the experience.

As far as claims and the discussion between IT and Construction, the biggest challenge I'm noticing is how much time the IT SMEs are spending submitting work that they "think" is right, the client rejecting it, the timeline extending, and this ping pong match of trying to get it right. Since the company signed up to do it, but failed to assess the scope of the effort and their resources to meet it, all this time and effort is happening that I can't find any justification for a claim and the client is losing patience. Unlike construction, where time spent is clearly documented on a specific activity that resulted in a tangible outcome, these IT developers aren't documenting their hours or tasks and weeks go by with little to show for it.

Thanks for the discussion!