AUTOMATION
Lookahead
A rolling view of the next few weeks that surfaces schedule risk while there is still time to act — built from the documents, meetings, and reports your routines already read.
Overview
Lookahead is the near-term slice of the programme: the activities due over the next three to six weeks, when they are planned, how they are tracking, and what threatens to slip. Its purpose is a single outcome — no surprises on schedule. Rather than wait for a monthly report to reveal that a milestone has moved, lookahead brings the movement forward while you can still do something about it.
Lookahead is deliberately not a scheduling tool. It does not replace your programme in MS Project or Primavera, and it does not attempt to recompute a critical path from scratch. It is a thin, current home for near-term activities so the Today surface can detect and raise schedule risk in plain language.
A byproduct of work you already do
The value of lookahead is that it is largely produced for you. As routines read meeting notes, daily reports, and connected data, activities and their dates flow into the lookahead — so keeping a live schedule view costs little extra effort.What it surfaces
Near-term activities, their progress, and the risk of a slip.
Each activity in the lookahead carries a small set of fields kept intentionally simple, so the view stays fast to read and easy to trust.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Activity | The name and a short description of the piece of work. |
| Planned dates | The start and end originally scheduled for the activity. |
| Actual dates | The real start and end as work progresses. |
| Status | Planned, in progress, completed, or blocked. |
| Progress | Roughly how far along the activity is, as a percentage. |
| Source | Where the activity came from — a meeting, a daily report, a connected tool, or an import. |
From these, lookahead highlights what matters to a project manager: activities that are behind, activities that are blocked, and the knock-on effect when one late activity holds up another that was due next. That downstream ripple — where a slip in one place puts a near-term milestone at risk — is the part hardest to see by eye and the part lookahead is built to catch.
A lookahead view of the next few weeks — activities in rows with planned bars, actual progress, and a highlighted item flagged as at risk of slipping.
Where the data comes from
Lookahead is fed, not typed. It draws on the sources you are already working in.
Activities arrive in the lookahead from several places, each tagged with where it came from so you can trace any date back to its source:
- →Meetings — programme discussion captured in meeting notes is read for activities and dates.
- →Daily and site reports — on-site diary entries update what actually started, finished, or stalled.
- →Connected tools and imports — schedule data brought in from a connected system or a spreadsheet import.
Because these are the same sources your routines read, a routine run is often what quietly keeps the lookahead current — extracting the programme change out of a report and applying it without a separate step from you.
Generating a lookahead workbook
Produce a shareable Gantt workbook on demand from a routine.
A routine can produce a lookahead as a deliverable using the GENERATE_LOOKAHEAD block. It reads schedule information out of the documents you point it at and outputs a workbook with a Gantt view you can download and share — useful for a weekly lookahead meeting or a pack sent to the team.
Options
The block can be tuned to how your project runs:
- →Window — how many weeks ahead to cover, typically three to six.
- →Grouping — organise activities by area, by trade, or by work breakdown.
- →Detail — whether to show completed items, the critical path, and constraints, and whether to count working days or calendar days.
To learn how to place this block in a routine and set its trigger, see Routines. The same routine engine that fills a template produces the lookahead workbook.
Keeping it current
An optional assist that applies confident changes and flags the rest.
Where it is enabled, an automatic assist can keep the lookahead in step with recent site updates and project documents. It reads for changes — dates that moved, activities that became blocked, milestones that were reached — applies the high-confidence ones, and surfaces the downstream risk they create.
You can preview the changes before they are applied: a dry run shows what would move, what risk it cascades into, and why, so nothing shifts in the schedule without your sight of it.
The automatic assist is gated
The auto-update capability is off by default and enabled per workspace. Reading and using the lookahead does not require it — without it, activities still flow in from your routines, meetings, and imports, and you update the schedule yourself.Availability
Lookahead is maturing. Some parts are further along than others.
The near-term lookahead view and the ability to generate a workbook are available as part of the routine engine. The automatic keeping-current assist is newer and rolled out selectively. As with routines generally, if a capability described here is not visible in your account, it has not yet been turned on for your workspace.
Lookahead works hand in hand with Routines and reports its risk signals into Today, where you see what needs attention each morning.