Cost overruns are a lagging indicator. By the time the budget moves, the decisions that caused it were made weeks earlier. The schedule moves first — which makes schedule health one of the earliest warning signals a programme has, and one of the most under-used.
Treat slippage as a signal, not a status
A task slipping by a day is data. A pattern of small slips clustering around the same crew, vendor or dependency is a trend — and trends are actionable while a single slip is just noise. The instrumentation that matters is the one that distinguishes the two.
- Track planned-versus-actual at the task level, not just the milestone.
- Roll task-level drift up to a programme-level health score.
- Flag dependencies whose float is shrinking before they hit zero.
When the schedule is a live model rather than a monthly slide, the conversation shifts from explaining a delay to preventing the next one.