Slippage and delay are not the same thing. Slippage is an activity finishing later than planned. Delay is the finish date, or a contract milestone, moving. Every delay begins as slippage. Most slippage never becomes delay, because float absorbs it or the team recovers it. The skill is knowing which slips are on their way to becoming delays while there is still time to act.
The indicators that move first
- Missed tasks. Activities that should have finished by the data date and did not. One month of misses is noise. Three months of a rising count is a trend.
- Baseline execution index. Tasks finished compared with tasks planned to finish. A BEI sliding below 0.95 says the plan is not being worked as written.
- Float erosion on near-critical paths. The critical path gets the attention. The path with ten days of float that loses three days a month is the one that surprises people.
- Start slippage. Work that starts late finishes late more often than not. Late starts on activities with long durations deserve a question at the next meeting.
- Procurement drift. Submittals returned for revision, approvals sitting with the owner, releases waiting on funding. Paperwork slips are slips.
Why teams explain them away
Every individual slip has a reasonable story. The inspector was out. The submittal needed one more round. The crew was pulled to a hotter area. Each story is true. The problem is that nobody adds the stories together. A schedule update that reports progress without trending these indicators is describing the weather without a barometer.
Turning signals into decisions
We report leading indicators beside the critical path every period, with a simple rule: any indicator trending the wrong way for two consecutive updates gets a named owner and a recovery question. Not a recovery plan yet. A question. Most of the time, the question alone is enough to catch the slip while it is still slippage.
Identifying slippage before it becomes a delay is the whole point of project controls. Everything else is record keeping.
Lola Osoba, Founder
See what a slip on your own network does in the Delay Impact Simulator, or ask us for schedule updates that trend the signals for you.
