Look-ahead
The rolling window a foreman actually works from — what is selected into it and why, how it is grouped, and the one clause that is not built yet.
The look-ahead is the construction working artifact: a rolling window from the data date showing what has to get built next and what is standing in the way of it. Three and six weeks are the presets; any window is configurable, and an explicit from-and-to overrides the preset entirely.
The window is calendar weeks, not working weeks — a look-ahead window is wall time. Three weeks is twenty-one days, inclusive of the last.
Like everything else in the engine it takes the data date as an input and never reads a clock, so "the three-week look-ahead as of the 14th" is reproducible in March and in a claim two years later.
The selection rule is the whole feature#
Three reasons a row is in the window:
| Reason | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Active | Running across the window |
| Starting | Starting inside it |
| Predecessor | Unstarted, outside the window, and holding up something in it |
That third one is what makes this a working document rather than a filtered bar chart. The reason a wall cannot be built next week is usually a task that is nowhere near next week, and a plain date filter hides exactly that. A predecessor row carries the rows it is blocking, so the list says what it is holding up rather than merely appearing in it.
The counts of all three are reported, so nothing is dropped without saying so.
The foreman's fields#
Each row carries its name, dates, total float, criticality, percent complete, and — where the project has them — crew and owner. A list of work for next week that cannot say whose it is sends somebody back to the grid.
⚠ A blank crew or owner is one blank on the sheet, whether the project has no resourcing at all or the row simply has nobody on it. The panel says which of the two it is once, at the top, rather than repeating it on every line.
Output#
The look-ahead plots through the same output pipeline as any other view — PDF, PNG or SVG.
Not built yet#
Constraint flags. The open request for information, the submittal, the delivery, the permit — the things that would actually stop a row starting. This is the most valuable join there is between a forms module and the schedule, and it is why forms and the schedule belong in the same product. The forms module does not exist, so neither does this.
A look-ahead without constraint flags is a schedule extract rather than a constraints document. Stated here rather than discovered on site.
Spreadsheet export. PDF and .xlsx both work today. The workbook writer is hand-written — a store-only ZIP and the OPC parts — rather than a dependency, for the same reason the PDF writer is.
Related#
- Activities, logic and the critical path
- Resources & levelling — where crew comes from.