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Look-Ahead Schedule

A short-term rolling schedule - typically 2 to 4 weeks - that breaks the master plan into daily actionable tasks for site teams, focusing on what's about to happen rather than the full project timeline.

The Problem a Look-Ahead Schedule Solves

On any Indian construction project with multiple towers and 200+ activities, the master schedule is a planning document - not an execution document. It shows milestones, dependencies, and the overall critical path. But it doesn't tell the shuttering crew on Tower A, Floor 9 what they need to finish by Wednesday.

That translation - from master plan to daily site action - is what the look-ahead schedule provides. Typically created weekly, it covers the next 2-4 weeks and includes task-level detail: specific activity descriptions, assigned subcontractors, required materials and their procurement status, predecessor tasks that must complete first, and daily or weekly targets.

Why Look-Aheads Break Down on Indian Sites

In principle, every project has a look-ahead. In practice, the quality varies enormously.

The most common failure: the look-ahead is created on Monday, printed, distributed to supervisors - and never updated. By Wednesday, two tasks have slipped, one material delivery is delayed, and a subcontractor has been redeployed to another tower. The printed look-ahead is now fiction.

This happens because creating and updating look-aheads is manual work. The planner extracts the relevant 2-week window from the master schedule, adds site-level detail, formats it for distribution, and - ideally - updates it daily as conditions change. On a project with 3-4 active towers, maintaining separate look-aheads for each tower becomes a full-time job.

The result: site engineers rely on WhatsApp groups and verbal instructions instead of the formal look-ahead. The schedule exists as a planning artifact, not a live execution tool.

How Effective Look-Aheads Work

The best-run construction projects treat the look-ahead as a living document that updates with every task completion, delay, or material arrival. When a look-ahead is digitally connected to the master schedule, changes flow both ways - a task marked complete on site updates the master schedule's progress, and a change in the master schedule (due to a delay elsewhere) automatically adjusts the look-ahead.

This two-way connection eliminates the most common look-ahead failure: being out of sync with reality. When the shuttering crew checks their look-ahead on Tuesday afternoon, it should reflect Monday's delay in the floor below - not show the original plan that's already obsolete.

The Last Planner System, developed by the Lean Construction Institute, formalises this approach by requiring daily commitment tracking - did we complete what we committed to? If not, why? That constraint analysis feeds into the next day's look-ahead, creating a continuous improvement loop that reduces variability over time.

Why this matters in construction

The master schedule might show 400 activities over 24 months. That's useful for overall planning but meaningless for the site engineer deciding what to do tomorrow morning. The look-ahead bridges this gap - pulling the next 2-4 weeks from the master schedule and adding ground-level detail: which crew, which floor, which materials need to arrive by when. Without it, site teams operate on memory and WhatsApp messages instead of a structured plan.

Related terms

How Buildrun Intelligence handles this

Buildrun auto-generates look-ahead schedules from the master plan, filtering relevant tasks by tower, floor, and trade - so site teams see only what matters to them this week, updated in real time.