Despite the numerous tools on the market, trending and forecasting construction performance against the budget and schedule has remained an underutilized aspect of project controls. The possible reasons include:
• Not understanding the techniques
• The lack of appropriate project controls personnel and procedures
• Not realizing the benefits of the results or the need to collect key data

Many industry standards for trending and forecasting techniques use approaches such as Earned Value (EV), resource loaded schedules and trend and change management processes. These approaches however are less often used on projects that have fewer staff resources.

This paper will explore practical trending techniques and forecasting approaches that utilize data available on a typical construction project. The goal is to provide an analysis framework that can be applied to a range of industries, user abilities and across projects of various size.