We asked over 200 planners and senior construction leaders across multiple sectors “What’s the biggest challenge in keeping your programme aligned with what’s happening on site?” as part of our joint webinar with SymTerra
Key statistics
- 30% of respondents identified progress capture, reporting and data quality as their primary challenge, making it the most frequently cited issue across the survey.
- 40-50% of main contractor responses focused on programme visibility, progress reporting and obtaining reliable site updates.
- Around 50% of consultant and project controls responses focused on data accuracy, reporting quality and planned-versus-actual performance.
- Four in ten respondents highlighted either progress reporting or information flow challenges, pointing to a widespread need for better visibility of site activity.
- Both planners and senior leaders ranked confidence in project reporting among their top concerns, indicating that programme visibility is a business-wide issue rather than a planning-only problem.
The evidence does not support a simple “planners focus on data and process, whilst leadership focuses on the people and governance” split. However, senior leaders mention change, delay and sequencing proportionally more often; planners mention workload, supply-chain constraints and programme adoption somewhat more often.
The differences become clearer when we look at the findings by sector, from main contractors, specialist contractors and MEP firms, to consultants and asset managers and owners.
Across all respondents, 30% identified progress capture, reporting and data quality as their primary concern, making it the most frequently cited issue regardless of role or organisation type.
Among main contractors, approximately 40-50% of responses focused on programme visibility, reporting accuracy and obtaining reliable updates from site teams, while specialist contractors and MEP firms were more likely to highlight coordination challenges, with around one-third citing subcontractor, trade or supply-chain dependencies as the biggest obstacle to programme alignment.
Consultants and project controls specialists demonstrated the strongest focus on governance and reporting integrity, with around half of consultant responses referencing data accuracy, progress validation or confidence in planned-versus-actual performance.
Naturally, clients, developers and owners showed greater interest in understanding programme impacts and supporting strategic decisions than in site-level reporting processes.
“These findings are really aligned with the conversations we have with our Asta Vision customers around managing risk and programme visibility,” commented Gerry Kelliher, managing director of Eleco UK. “We find that whilst everyone’s motivation is different, at the end of the day, it’s progress visibility that helps to deliver programmes on time or even ahead of a schedule.”
“Most of the people we spoke to don’t have a planning problem, they have an information problem. The programme is only as good as the last update from site, and that update is usually late, vague, or both. We built SymTerra so the people doing the work can record progress as they go, and the planner sees it the same day,” added John Ryan, director of SymTerra.
For more details, you can watch the panel discussion with Brendan Johnston, planning director at McLaren Construction Group, Dave Shaw, operations director at Montel Civil Engineering and Ben Fitzerald, former associate director at Aecom, chaired by Peter Jaworski, head of sales at Eleco UK and John Ryan, director at SymTerra.
We will also show how your project data can help you make better business decisions in our upcoming webinar on 24 November, find out more here.
