Monthly Site Reporting: What to Look For

Status is a lagging indicator

By the time a programme shows a task as late, the cause is one to three months old. The signal was in the trend.

A monthly report that says every trade is "on track" is not good news or bad news. It is a snapshot of where the work is today, and today was decided some time ago. What a client can still change is next quarter, and next quarter shows up in the patterns, not in the status column.

What a useful monthly report contains

• Progress against the programme, trade by trade, with the percentage complete last month beside this month's.
• Photographs from the same positions every month, so change can be seen rather than described.
• Open queries — to the architect, the engineer, the authorities — with the date each was raised.
• The long-lead schedule: every item, its order date, and whether it has been ordered.
• Decisions the client owes, and the date after which each starts to cost time.
• Cost: variations instructed this month, and the running position against the locked budget.

A report missing the last three is a progress report, not a programme report.

The three patterns worth watching

A trade slipping slightly, repeatedly. Any single month's shortfall is noise; three in a row is a resourcing problem that has not been named yet.

Open queries accumulating faster than they close. Every unanswered question is a piece of work that cannot start. When the count rises month on month, the site is about to start waiting on the drawings.

Long-lead items unconfirmed past their order date. This is the one that is easiest to see and most often ignored, because nothing on site looks wrong yet.

Why long-lead items are decided at month eight, not month twenty

Some things are not bought when they are needed; they are bought when their lead time says they must be. Natural stone selected from a particular quarry, imported window and door systems, a lift, custom ironmongery, specialist joinery and large-format tiles are the usual examples in a landed house. Each has to be selected, sampled, approved, made and shipped before it arrives on site.

So the order date is worked backwards: from the day the item is needed, less the time to make and ship it, less the time to sample and approve it. On a programme of about two years, that puts many of the important decisions around the middle of the build — which is why the answer above says month eight. A stone still being chosen at month eight is installed late at month twenty, and the house waits for it, finished in every other respect.

The useful report shows the long-lead schedule every month, and the useful reader checks one thing on it: is any item past its order date without an order?

The questions worth asking every month

• Which trade is behind, and is this the first month or the third?
• How many queries are open, and how many were open last month?
• Which long-lead items are due to be ordered in the next two months, and are the selections made?
• What do you need from me, and by when?

Who should be reading it

Somebody whose job is the programme rather than the work. On a split contract that person often does not exist: the builder reports on the build, the designer on the drawings, and nobody reads the two together. On our projects one party holds the whole programme, and pattern-reading across monthly reporting is one of the five places AI sits in the process, precisely because it is a task people do badly, and inconsistently.

The Complete Landed Rebuild Guide sets the reporting in the context of the whole programme.