From Gantt chart to boardroom: Using real-time project data to drive decisions

The UK construction sector is entering 2026 with cautious optimism. Industry forecasts point to output growth of around 2.7%, supported by major infrastructure investment, a rebounding private housing sector, and planning reforms designed to accelerate stalled schemes. Yet beneath the headline numbers, margins remain under pressure, insolvency rates are elevated, and the average construction payment period has stretched to 49 days; the longest in a decade. 

As a result, both main contractors and client-side project directors share a common problem: they need reliable, real-time information to steer projects and portfolios, not just static monthly reports that arrive too late to influence decisions. The gap between what is happening on site and what appears in the boardroom has never been more urgent. 

Why 2026 is the year of no more surprises 

Construction is a high-stakes, low-margin business. With profit margins for main contractors averaging just 1–2%, a single delay, a missed milestone payment, or an unanticipated cashflow squeeze can tip a project from viable to distressed. At the same time, clients managing multi-project portfolios – whether housing developers, infrastructure operators, or public sector bodies – are under intense scrutiny from boards, lenders and regulators to prove that schemes will deliver on time and to budget. 

The traditional model (where planning managers update projects manually, circulate PDFs to the commercial team, and senior leadership sees a sanitised summary in a monthly pack), simply does not work at the pace or scale required in 2026. By the time a milestone slippage appears in a board report, it is often too late to recover the float, renegotiate the project, or reallocate resources without commercial pain. 

Consider the scale of the challenge. The UK construction workload for 2026 is forecast at £39 billion, with infrastructure alone expected to contribute £9.1 billion and private housing £13.5 billion. Projects are becoming more complex, with tighter planning conditions around sustainability, embodied carbon and community engagement, and increasingly stringent Building Safety Act requirements for golden thread documentation.  

As a response, the tolerance for project ambiguity has collapsed. Contractors who cannot prove project credibility will struggle to win work or manage risk. Clients who lack portfolio-level visibility will miss early warning signs, overpay for variations, and face difficult conversations with funders when schemes slip. 

The gap between site reality and boardroom reports 

Walk onto any construction site in the UK and you will find activity: trades coordinating, materials arriving, inspections happening, problems being solved. Yet translating that kinetic complexity into accurate, up-to-date project information remains stubbornly manual and slow. 

Typically, site managers or engineers fill out progress sheets, spreadsheets or emails at the end of the week. These are passed to the planning team, who manually update the master project, reconcile conflicts, and generate reports. By the time the updated Gantt chart reaches the project director, it’s already out of date. Worse still, portfolio-level reporting often relies on inconsistent data structures, different update cycles, and bespoke spreadsheets that cannot be compared like-for-like. 

This is not just an administrative inconvenience. It creates real commercial and strategic risk: 

• Late visibility of delay: If a critical path activity slips by a week but is not surfaced until the monthly review, the opportunity to recover time through resequencing or resource adjustment is lost. 
• Inability to test scenarios: Without a live, validated project, it is impossible to model the impact of a design change, a material delay, or a planning condition variation before committing to a course of action. 
• Weak governance and assurance: Clients cannot hold contractors accountable to milestones if the baseline project is static, and they cannot prioritise interventions across a portfolio if they don’t know which projects are genuinely at risk. 
• Erosion of trust: When board-level reports do not match site reality, stakeholders stop trusting the data, default to anecdote and spreadsheet workarounds, and make decisions in the dark. 

The granular information needed to fix this problem actually already exists. Site teams know which activities have started, which are behind, and which are blocked. The challenge is capturing that knowledge once, in a structured way, and using it to drive both operational control and strategic insight. 

Capturing progress once, using it everywhere 

The solution lies in integrated, real-time project management where progress data flows from site to master programme to portfolio dashboard without re-keying, without delay, and without loss of fidelity. 

Modern construction planning platforms now enable site teams to update progress directly via mobile devices or tablets, recording completions, recording delays, and flagging constraints as they happen. These updates feed automatically into the master programme, recalculating the critical path, updating forecasts, and surfacing early warnings in real time. This is not theoretical. Major UK contractors and developers are already operating this way, using structured project data to compress reporting cycles, reduce commercial disputes, and improve predictability. 

Practical steps to get started with real-time project management 

For organisations still relying on disconnected tools, manual updates, and retrospective reporting, the shift to real-time, portfolio-level project management can feel daunting. But it does not require a complete transformation overnight. The key is to start with the highest-value use case and build capability iteratively. 

Step 1: Standardise your baseline
Define a standard work breakdown structure, activity coding system, and milestone framework that applies across all projects. This may require alignment between planning, commercial, and project delivery teams, but it is the foundation for meaningful portfolio reporting. 

Step 2: Establish a single source of truth
Choose a platform (such as Asta Vision) that allows project data from multiple projects to be aggregated, validated, and interrogated centrally. Ensure that all projects feed into this system, either natively or via structured data exchange. 

Step 3: Automate progress capture
Equip site teams with tools to update progress directly, whether via mobile apps, tablet-based dashboards, or integration with site diary systems. The goal is to eliminate double-handling: capture progress once, use it everywhere. 

Step 4: Build dashboards around decisions, not decoration
Design portfolio dashboards to answer the questions your leadership asks: Which milestones are at risk in the next 4–8 weeks? Which projects have the least float? Where are we seeing repeated slippages, and why? Resist the temptation to create dashboards full of charts that look impressive but do not drive action. 

Step 5: Embed project review into governance
Make live project data a standing item in project and portfolio governance meetings. Use it to test scenarios, challenge assumptions, and track the effectiveness of recovery plans. Over time, this shifts the culture from “reporting what happened” to “steering what happens next.” 

The UK construction sector in 2026 has more work, tighter margins, and higher expectations for delivery certainty than at any point in recent memory. In this context, real-time project data is a strategic asset. The gap between the Gantt chart and the board room is closing. The question is whether your organisation will lead that shift, or be left explaining to stakeholders why the programme you presented last month is already out of date.