How over-reliance on static reporting can cloud decisions
For those of us with many years in the construction industry, we are constantly bemused by yet another report about the slow adoption of digital technology across the industry. Many quote the McKinsey report from 2017 “Reinventing Construction” about the challenges for increasing productivity unless the industry changes.
However, across some areas such as design, the industry has embraced developments such as VR / AR and recently AI. Quite often though, the shared output of these digital tools (meant for collaborative review) is a spreadsheet or static PDF, a situation which is prevalent across many of constructions disciplines. In reporting especially, we find that these manual legacy approaches have continued to be used by busy project professionals.
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence. It is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
Peter Drucker
In order to succeed, construction projects must demand real-time insights and agile decision-making. Yet, traditional reporting methods – often relying on spreadsheets, static PDFs, or plan-on-a-page reports – continue to constrain operational efficiency.
For construction professionals and leadership teams managing everything from on-site operations to strategic oversight, the reliance on static reports can lead to delays, higher project risks, and ultimately poorer business decisions.
The temptation for a “Rose-Tinted” view
It’s not uncommon to present a more favourable, “rose-tinted” view of a project when reporting to leadership. After all, positive progress reports may be what’s needed from a client PR perspective to help secure ongoing support.
However, this polished version often masks underlying issues that could derail the project if left unaddressed. When leadership (or other interested stakeholders) receives an overly optimistic snapshot, they may not be aware of the risks or delays that require immediate or proactive intervention.
A Cautionary Tale:
Consider the case of a major building project. The planning team, under pressure to report progress, prepared a series of static reports highlighting only progress to date, which is largely on track and positive. These reports, however, omitted some critical details: minor delays in material shipments, emerging resource shortages a major subcontractor in administration. Leadership, seeing only a flawless execution plan, decided to focus their attention and potentially additional resources on another project.
As the project progressed, the hidden issues began to manifest. Material delays accumulated and stopped work in one area, resource shortages on key trades led to poor output rates and more work becoming critical and the subcontractor going into administration left the project open to significant delays whilst the project leadership sought a solution.
When the business leadership finally received a comprehensive update, it was clear that the “rose-tinted” reporting had obscured a growing problem. By then, the opportunity to address these issues had passed, resulting in budget overruns, missed deadlines and potential liquidated damages for missed completion dates.
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Take also the scenario where leaders bid for more work due to the overly positive reports across existing projects. Resources can quickly become stretched, delays increase, and penalty fines rack up and start to cripple the company.
The demands of modern construction projects (in our marginal industry) require swift, data-driven decisions, and abstracting data into static spreadsheets adds unnecessary time lag and potential for error or data manipulation to the process.
Leaders need to reduce administrative burdens and empower teams with live access to real project performance and strategic insights. A data platform-driven approach – whereby democratising data access and ensuring information is entered once and used many times – is the solution.
The Project, Programme and Portfolio reporting challenge
Projects have always faced challenges of competing constraints (client deadlines, resources, materials, governance), managing all the moving parts of a project within and outside of your control remains a significant challenge. Powerful planning applications such as Asta Powerproject enable programme managers and schedulers to build baselined plans with bespoke code libraries, critical path and resource dependencies. However, access to the live insights from Asta are often constrained to licensed users. Non ‘power’ users, like site managers, package managers, and wider construction teams frequently rely on plan-on-a-page PDF’s, screenshots in PowerPoint, or manually created Excel workbooks to stay updated. This outdated approach delays critical information sharing, impedes swift decision-making, and increases the risk of misinterpretation.
Some organisations attempt to overcome these challenges by using tools like PowerBI to create real-time dashboards. These dashboards can offer dynamic visualisations of project performance, providing a more balanced and objective view. However, configuring and maintaining such dashboards usually requires IT support or expert external consultants.
Enabling operational and strategic excellence
By integrating powerful planning applications such as Asta Powerproject with future-ready data and reporting platforms such as Acumine’s Build Intelligence, operational managers and executives can access real-time, role-specific information without cumbersome data transposition, enabling construction leaders to achieve:
- Real-Time Dashboards: Operational managers can view live dashboards that accurately reflect progress, risks, and resource allocation—without the delays or biases inherent in static reports.
- Strategic Insights: Executives and directors receive balanced, role-specific data that supports informed decision-making, without relying on artificially positive summaries.
- Streamlined Reporting: Removing Excel and other manual intermediaries minimises errors and ensures data consistency across the organisation.
- Proactive Risk Management: With immediate access to real-time information, teams can detect risks early and intervene before minor issues escalate into major problems.
Embedding a culture of data-driven leadership
Transitioning from static to live, digital reporting is more than a technology upgrade—it’s a strategic shift toward transparency and accountability. By providing every decision-maker with accurate, up-to-date data, organisations can avoid the pitfalls of a “rose-tinted” perspective and ensure that both operational and strategic decisions are grounded in reality.
Embracing a digital, data-driven approach not only streamlines project management but also empowers leaders to act on the full picture—ensuring projects are delivered on time, within budget, and with all risks transparently managed.
