Glossary
Look-ahead schedule
A short-horizon (usually 3–6 week) detailed schedule of upcoming work, pulled from the master schedule to coordinate crews and constraints.
A look-ahead schedule is a near-term, high-detail view of upcoming construction work — typically covering the next three to six weeks — derived from the master schedule and broken down to the crew level.
Where the master schedule shows the whole job at a high level, the look-ahead is the working document foremen and superintendents use to coordinate trades, line up materials, and clear constraints before they block work. Each line should carry a duration, a responsible party, and its dependencies (predecessor trades, approved submittals, answered RFIs, inspections).
The hard part isn’t building one — it’s keeping it current as the site changes. A look-ahead that isn’t updated weekly is worse than none, because people trust it.
We wrote a full guide on this: how to build a look-ahead schedule and keep it current. The key is deriving it from one live plan rather than a separate spreadsheet that drifts.