The pattern is consistent across sectors: the number that used to arrive late arrives early, and the person who has to answer for it sees it at the same time as the board.
By organisation shape
Different sectors and sizes describing the same gap between what the plan said and what anyone could prove. Figures are aggregates across customers on each profile.
A large capital portfolio governed in spreadsheets, where slippage surfaced at the quarterly review rather than the week it happened.
Performance agreements that had drifted into personal to-do lists, with no way to show how any of them served the trading plan.
Six systems holding fragments of the same project, so margin, utilisation and delivery status never agreed with each other.
Performance contracts signed in April and revisited in March, with progress claims that had no field evidence attached to them.
The pattern
Before the tooling conversation, the same four complaints, in almost the same words.
Strategy, delivery and HR each reporting a different version of the same quarter, reconciled by hand.
Bad news arriving after the window to act on it had already closed.
No way to get from a number on the board pack to the work that produced it.
Manual assembly, reconciled by hand, and out of date by the time it was read.
Aggregate
Variance read against a frozen baseline rather than a revised plan.
Enforced by the schema, not by a reviewer checking afterwards.
Counted in the first twelve months after rollout.
PMO, HR and finance reading the same records.
Thirty days on your own objectives and project register usually answers it inside the first week.
