The master schedule is a promise about the job. The lookahead is a plan for the next three weeks, and it exists because the master schedule cannot tell you whether Tuesday is going to work.

A master schedule says drywall starts on the 14th. It does not know that the electrical rough-in inspection has not been booked, that the board is on a truck that has not left the yard, or that the framer still has two days of work in that area. The lookahead is where those things get caught — ideally two weeks before they would have stopped a crew.

Master schedule vs. lookahead

They answer different questions and should not be the same document.

  • The master schedule covers the whole job, in activities that may run days or weeks, and it is the contractual record of duration and sequence. It changes rarely and formally.
  • The lookahead covers the next three weeks, broken down to the level a foreman can assign — often a day or two per task, by crew and by area. It changes every week, on purpose.

The lookahead is derived from the master schedule. It is not a replacement for it, and the moment the two disagree without anyone noticing, you have two plans and no schedule.

Why three weeks

Three weeks is a compromise that has held up across the industry for a reason:

  • It is long enough to do something about most constraints. Material lead times under three weeks can be expedited. Inspections can be booked. Crews can be moved.
  • It is short enough to be credible. Nobody can tell you accurately what a specific crew is doing in week seven, and a plan that pretends otherwise gets ignored.

Some teams run two weeks, some six. The number matters less than the discipline of rebuilding it every week and checking constraints against it.

Building it

1. Pull the window from the master schedule

Take every activity that starts, continues or finishes in the next three weeks. Include activities that should have finished already and have not — those are the ones most likely to break the following week.

2. Break activities into assignable tasks

A master schedule activity reading "Level 2 MEP rough-in — 15 days" is not something a foreman can assign. Break it down by area, by trade and by crew until each line is work a specific crew can start and finish in a day or two. "Level 2 east, electrical rough-in, grids 1–6, 2 days, Crew B" is assignable.

This is the step that makes lookaheads useful and the one most often skipped. A lookahead that is just the master schedule filtered to three weeks adds nothing.

3. Run the constraint check

This is the actual work. For every task in the window, ask whether each of these is in place. A task with any constraint unresolved is not ready, and should not be promised.

  • Predecessor work — is the work this depends on genuinely complete, or just scheduled to be?
  • Materials — ordered, confirmed, and arriving before the start date, with somewhere to put them
  • Labour — is the crew actually available, or are they committed to another job that week?
  • Equipment — booked, delivered, and with an operator
  • Information — are there open RFIs, unapproved submittals or unresolved design conflicts covering this work?
  • Permits and inspections — booked, with enough notice for the authority's actual lead time
  • Site access and conditions — is the area available, safe, and vacated by the previous trade?

Every constraint that is not clear gets an owner and a date by which it must be resolved. "Somebody should chase that" is not a constraint resolution.

4. Only promise what is clear

Work with unresolved constraints stays visible in the lookahead but does not get committed. This is the discipline that makes the whole exercise worth doing: a plan containing only work that can actually happen is a plan people start believing, and a plan people believe is one they will tell you about when it slips.

5. Assign crews explicitly

Every committed task gets a named crew or foreman. Unassigned work in a lookahead is work nobody is doing.

The weekly meeting

Same day, same time, every week. Forty-five minutes with the people who actually direct crews — superintendent, foremen, and the key subcontractors. Not a management meeting about the job; a working session where next week gets agreed.

The agenda that works:

  1. Last week's commitments. What was promised, what was completed, and for anything missed, why. This comes first deliberately — it sets whether commitments in this room are real.
  2. Week one in detail. Task by task, crew by crew, confirmed as ready and committed.
  3. Weeks two and three. Constraints reviewed, owners assigned, dates set.
  4. New constraints and escalations. Anything that needs someone outside the room.

Subcontractors commit to their own work in that meeting rather than being told what they are doing. A commitment someone made themselves gets honoured considerably more often than one issued to them.

Measuring whether it works

Track the percentage of committed tasks completed as planned each week — commonly called Percent Plan Complete. Count only tasks fully completed, and only those committed the previous week. Partial credit defeats the purpose.

A team starting out often lands around 50%. Consistently reaching 80% or better usually means constraints are genuinely being cleared before work is committed. The trend matters far more than any single week's number.

Then look at the reasons for the misses, which are more useful than the percentage. If the same cause appears week after week — materials arriving late, a trade consistently overrunning, inspections never booked with enough notice — that is a systemic problem the lookahead has just found for you.

Common failures

  • Producing it and not meeting about it. A lookahead emailed out on Friday is a document. One agreed in a room is a plan.
  • Committing work with open constraints because the master schedule says it should start. This is the fastest way to teach everyone that the lookahead is fiction.
  • Never updating the master schedule. If the lookahead keeps revealing slippage and the master schedule never moves, you are managing two realities.
  • Excluding subcontractors. Most of the constraints belong to them. So does most of the information about whether next week is achievable.
  • Treating misses as blame. The moment the meeting becomes about fault, people stop reporting problems early, and early reporting is the entire value of the exercise.

Doing this in BuilderSolve

The work planner lets you plan the week crew by crew in a single grid, then roll that plan into lookahead reports showing what is coming, who is assigned and where the gaps are — built from the same schedule and estimate data the rest of the platform runs on, so the lookahead and the master schedule cannot quietly drift apart.

See how the work planner works →