Programme Intelligence
Programme Intelligence turns construction schedules into a ranked, plain-English account of what's on track, what's slipping, and what needs a decision this period — before the next progress meeting, not after it.
The platform
Acumine's hosted platform for construction teams.
Outtrn™
/ ˈaʊt.tɜːn / noun
The industry term
In construction, the outturn is where a project actually lands at completion — the date it finishes and the cost it finishes at — measured against what was originally forecast.
The date in the contract and the date you're actually heading for are rarely the same. That gap opens quietly — weeks or months before it surfaces in a report.
The idea
Most tools render the programme and leave the analysis to you, so the quality of the review depends on who is doing it and how much time they have that period. Programme Intelligence runs it for you, to the same standard on every project — and it doesn't replace your planners. It takes the repetitive review work off their plate and frees them for proactive management of the works and the judgement calls only they can make.
How you run it
Acumine®-hosted
The fastest way in: nothing to set up or run yourself. When you want it, Commercial Intelligence is available in the same platform.
Built into your environment
Acumine® builds solutions into your environment, drawing on the connectors, data models and delivery patterns our experience has proven — so you are not starting from a blank page, and you are live in weeks rather than quarters.
Portfolio
Not a pack someone assembled for the meeting, but the current position on every programme you are accountable for — side by side, and genuinely comparable, because each one has been read the same way.
Elapsed time, schedule variance, SPI, the forecast completion date against the planned one and the gap between them in weeks, plus a schedule-quality rating — for every project and every type of programme you run. Sort by whichever column matters this period and you have your agenda.
Every programme has been through the same analysis, so a gap between two projects is a real difference in performance rather than a difference in who wrote the report or how much time they had. The portfolio number and the project number are the same number.
Any row opens that programme's full dashboard, down to the activities behind the number. “Why is that one amber?” gets answered in the meeting it is asked in, rather than actioned to the next one.
Insights — what needs attention
Drop into a project and Insights is where the review should start. It runs the analyst's triage automatically — the same way, on every project — and hands you a ranked feed of findings in plain English, each scored by severity, each a single click from the detail that proves it. Snooze what you have already actioned, and bring it back when you want the full picture.
It opens with a straight answer to the only question stakeholders actually ask — “Is this programme on time?” — as a headline verdict with the reasoning spelled out, reconciled against the live schedule so the banner can never read “green” while the critical path is on fire.
Blockwork is 598 days behind plan and still open, gating 785 downstream activities — three on the critical path.
View the evidence →Critical-path activities in negative float — overdue or imminent.
Work in progress stagnating; commitment reliability (PPC) slipping.
Schedule-quality breaches flagged against protocol tolerances.
Leading indicators you can still influence: activities in negative float, critical-path tasks overdue or imminent, near-critical work one slip from the critical path, and open blockers gating dozens of downstream activities.
Variance to date: slice-by-slice slippage, stagnating work in progress, commitment reliability (PPC) and schedule-quality breaches.
Sentences a project director can act on, ordered so the most material issue is first — a finding beats a red cell every time.
A “where the risk sits” bar clusters at-risk activities by trade and area — one click filters the whole dashboard to that package.
Each finding deep-links, filter pre-applied, into the detail that substantiates it. No finding is a dead end.
Forecasts anchor to actual progress, and a near-zero variance against a re-planned baseline is called out rather than celebrated. The findings do not flatter the schedule.
What's inside
The analytical views planning teams rely on, in one place — and every number drills to the activities behind it.
The page you open before the meeting. Variance, SPI, progress, completion dates, work in progress and the overall quality rating on one screen, with the S-curve and the next critical activities beside them. Where the completion date comes from a milestone your planner coded, it says so — and where none is set, it tells you, rather than letting you quote a number that means something else.
Progress against plan, with the forecast anchored to where the job actually is. That anchoring is the point: it stops a re-planned baseline making a project that is weeks behind look like it is on track. Filter to a trade, a building or a work package and every measure recalculates for it.
The programme as your planners drew it, with baseline bars, live bars and the logic between them on the same view. Three lenses on one click — the full structure, the critical path on its own, or milestones only — so you can walk a subcontractor through their work without walking anyone through 22,000 lines.
What starts, what finishes and what is in progress across whatever window you need, from next week to the next year. Above it, the measure that shows whether last period's commitments were actually met — and what is overdue to start or finish right now. The difference between a plan and a wish.
Leads with work that has quietly stopped moving — the thing a percentage-complete figure hides best. Then a breakdown for every branch of the programme: overdue to start, behind, on time, finished, still ahead. Alongside it, the second and third critical paths queuing up behind the first.
Whether the programme can carry the weight you are about to put on it. Missing logic, negative float, hard constraints, dangling links, over-long durations and the rest — scored against recognised DCMA/CIOB tolerances, RAG rated, and one click from the activities at fault. The difference between a forecast you present and one you stake your name on.
Where the labour peaks and troughs sit, by headcount or by hours, per resource, set against what has actually been earned. Over-allocation shows up while there is still time to do something about it, rather than in the post-mortem for the milestone it cost.
One button, one document: the on-time verdict, the KPIs, the S-curve, the findings that need attention and the critical-path Gantt. Fixed A4 landscape, still readable in black and white, and a real PDF you can send — not a browser print dialog, and not screenshots pasted into slides. The board pack, from the same evidence the dashboard shows.
Works with your programme
No re-planning, no parallel programme to maintain, no new way of working to adopt first. Your existing files and systems are the input.
Native Asta PowerProject (.pp, .ppb) and Primavera P6 (.xer, .xml) files, recognised for you. Prefer not to upload? We will connect Asta Vision or the P6 EPPM API for you, and the portfolio refreshes itself on your data-date cycle. At steady state, nobody uploads anything.
Any programme template, any WBS structure, any activity coding, user-defined fields and calendars exactly as they are. There is nothing to re-model before you get an answer, and no change to how your planners build or maintain a programme. If two regions structure their programmes differently, both still work.
Every schedule belongs to a programme type — tender, pre-construction, PCSA, contract, delivery, or whatever your business calls them. The list is governed centrally, so a tender programme is never reported as a delivery programme. Each type carries its own completion milestone, key milestones and the baseline it is measured against — and the baseline in play is named on the report, so nothing is quietly compared to the wrong thing.
You decide whether a new programme goes live straight away or waits for a planner to look first. Where you want the check, it lands as pending — reviewable, but held back from the portfolio and leadership views until someone approves it, with the previous version superseded and kept in the trend. Where you don't, set auto-approval for that programme type and it flows straight through. Verification where it is worth having, no bottleneck where it isn't.
Governed, permissioned, auditable
Role-based access puts the right view in front of the right people — from the work package to the board — without handing everyone the whole schedule.
Governance is what makes the wider access safe: permissions are the reason you can open the programme beyond the planning team with confidence, rather than despite it.
The business case
The review time saved is easy to count and the smaller number. What matters more is what the programme team does with sight of a problem weeks earlier.
The arithmetic is straightforward. Recover one week, once, on one project, and this has paid for itself several times over. Everything after that — across the portfolio, across the year — is upside. The review time saved is what the status quo costs; this is what an earlier decision is worth.
Working with Acumine
Acumine® has delivered programme analytics inside tier-one contractor environments for years. Where the hosted platform is not the right fit, we build programme analytics into your own estate instead.
Connect Asta PowerProject, Asta Vision and Primavera P6 into governed, reusable data foundations — drawing on connectors we have built and proven across this kind of work.
Establish DCMA/CIOB-style schedule-quality standards across the business, with the review cadence and accountability to make them stick.
Build the leadership reporting layer that brings programme performance, milestone risk and slippage together across the whole portfolio.
Define how planning, project controls and reporting work together — the process and governance around the data, not just the dashboards.
Solutions built into your own estate using Acumine® components, connectors and patterns, shaped around your operating model.
Work alongside your planning and data teams to embed better reporting, transfer knowledge and support solutions long term.
Programme and Commercial are where we have productised our work. Acumine's wider data practice spans strategy, engineering, quality and portfolio analytics — see the full breadth of what we do, or how we work with tier-one contractors.
Organisations Acumine® works with
What customers say
Feedback from planning directors, regional heads of planning and project controls teams on Acumine's service delivery and programme analytics work.
Acumine has been transformative in how we interact with our planning software. From our junior site managers through to our directors Acumine has given Willmott Dixon a new depth of insight that was never immediately visible when looking at a gantt chart.
Working with Acumine has been a game-changer for McLaren Construction. They have completely transformed the way we report and analyse our construction programmes across all projects in our organisation.
The impact on our efficiency has been remarkable. By removing layers of manual input and eliminating repetitive reporting tasks, the planning dashboard has freed up valuable time and ensured far greater accuracy and consistency in our data. What was once a labour-intensive process is now streamlined and effortless.
Acumine's approach was incisive and delivered tangible results very promptly. Their team has hands on experience of managing complex construction works and they translate this readily into business analytics that give management real-time data across all aspects of the business.
Programme Intelligence in Outtrn
See Outtrn™ against your own programme, or talk to us about building programme intelligence into your own environment.