Director's Field Notes
Director's Field Notes · Part 1 of 10
What I Look For Before I Accept Reported Progress
Reported progress is a claim. Before it becomes a fact I can forecast on, it has to reconcile with the record — actual dates, physical evidence, and the sequence the work was actually built in.
A contractor’s update lands showing the job at 62%. The first thing I do is treat that number as a claim, not a fact — because reported progress and actual progress are different things, and the gap between them is where forecasts quietly go wrong.
Here is what I reconcile before I accept it.
Actual dates against the record. Do the actual starts and finishes match the site records, the daily reports, the photographs — or were they back-calculated from a percentage on the data date? A programme that “achieves” round numbers every cycle is telling you it is being updated to a target, not measured against reality.
Physical against reported. Is the physical progress on the ground consistent with the percentage claimed? A 62% that rests on 90% of the easy work and none of the hard work is not 62% in any sense that helps me forecast.
The percent-complete method. Is it the same rule every cycle — duration, physical, or units — or has it drifted to whatever flatters the update? Inconsistent progress typing makes trend meaningless.
Out-of-sequence progress. Where work has happened out of the planned order, I do not treat it as noise. It is a signal the logic no longer reflects how the job is being built — and until the logic is corrected, the forecast built on it is unreliable.
Remaining duration, not just percent. The forecast is usually driven by remaining duration, not the percent typed over the top. I check which is actually controlling, because a comfortable percentage sitting on an untouched, unrealistic remaining duration is a forecast waiting to fail.
None of this is about catching the contractor out. It is about the fact that every forecast, every delay analysis and every decision downstream rests on this number — and a number I cannot evidence is a number I cannot defend.
Accept progress on the record, not the assertion. The percentage is where the argument starts, not where it ends.