Ready means six different things.

The activity was in the programme. It was in the look-ahead. Everybody had agreed to it the previous Friday. And it couldn't start, because ready is an adjective and six people were using it about six different things.

The six tests are already in the complaints

You don't need a standard to work out what ready should mean on your job. The definition is sitting inside what people say when work fails to start.

Somebody said the drawing is not issued for construction. That is drawing readiness: a current revision exists, is approved, and has reached the people who will build from it.

Somebody said the material has not left the store. That is material readiness: the quantity is on site, released, and physically at the workface rather than in a laydown area two kilometres away.

Somebody said the crane is in another zone. That is plant readiness: the equipment the method needs is available on the day, not merely owned by the project.

Somebody said the gang went elsewhere. That is labour readiness: a crew of the right trade and size is actually allocated, which is a different question from whether the headcount exists.

Somebody said the permit was never obtained. That is permit readiness: the authorisations for that activity, in that location, on that day.

And the inspection request nobody raised is access and predecessor readiness: the preceding work has been signed off, and the area is handed over and physically reachable.

Six tests, derived from six complaints.

Not a framework borrowed from somewhere else — a list of the things that have already stopped work on your own project.

Why one owner is never enough

The reason readiness is difficult has nothing to do with any single department being slow.

Each of the six belongs to a different person. Drawings to engineering. Material to procurement and the store. Plant to construction. Labour to the subcontractor. Permits to HSE or to the client. Access to whoever finished the work before.

None of them can see the other five. Engineering can be entirely confident the drawing went out, and be right, while the crane is somewhere else. Six people each doing their job correctly still produces an activity that can't start, and no one of them is in a position to notice.

That gap is what a workfront view is for. It is not a planning technique. It is the one place where all six are looked at together, against a single piece of work, before somebody is sent to do it.

The constraint that was closed in a meeting

Constraints get recorded in whatever was to hand. A spreadsheet on one job. Meeting minutes on another. The workfront sheet itself. On more jobs than I would like, nowhere at all.

The recording is not really the problem. Closure is.

Somebody says it is sorted, and everybody moves on. Nobody writes down who sorted it, on what date, or on what evidence. The following week the same item comes up again, and the same conversation happens, and it is impossible to tell whether it was never closed or closed and then broken again by something else.

A constraint log that records only the constraint is half a log. What matters is the closure: who, when, and what proves it. Until that exists, a project can't answer the only question that counts on a Thursday afternoon, which is what is genuinely clear to start on Monday.

How a look-ahead turns into a wish list

Here is the failure this whole week is about, and it happens quietly enough that most projects never name it.

An activity is not ready, so it doesn't start. It also doesn't get removed. It stays on the same dates, appears in the next look-ahead, and everybody assumes it will go this time. It doesn't. It appears again the week after. And again.

Nothing dramatic happens at any single step. But after two months the look-ahead has stopped describing what the site is going to build and started describing what the project would like the site to build. The two documents look identical. Only one of them is a plan.

Once that has happened the damage spreads. The foreman stops treating the look-ahead as instruction, because half of it didn't happen last week either. Progress forecasts inherit the same optimism. And the reported percentage drifts for exactly the reason Week 8 described, except that here the cause is upstream of the measurement: work that was never going to start was counted as work that was about to.

What a definition would actually cost

I should be straight about this. I have not seen a written definition of ready that was genuinely used by everybody on a project. Checklists existed. Look-ahead meetings existed. Workfront sheets existed. A single set of criteria that engineering, the store, HSE and the subcontractor all applied the same way didn't.

That is worth saying because it tells you where the difficulty sits. Writing the six tests takes an afternoon. Getting six departments to accept that an activity is not ready until all six are satisfied is a different matter, because it means an activity nobody objected to can still be refused, and that feels to each department like being blocked by somebody else's paperwork.

The argument that works is not a procedural one. It is that the alternative is sending a crew to a workface where they can't work, which every one of those six people has watched happen and none of them enjoyed.

System design

A constraint log that records only the constraint is half a log. The columns that matter are the closing ones, because an item nobody can prove was closed will be raised again next week.

Record	Produced by	Required quality	Verified against	Feeds
Constraint	Whoever is blocked	Named against one of the six tests	The workfront	Look-ahead
Owner	Project controls	A person who can clear it, not a department	Organisation	Follow-up
Closure	The owner	Who, when, and the evidence	The evidence itself	Ready work list
Ready work list	Project controls	Only items passing all six tests	Constraint log	Look-ahead, weekly meeting

The last column is the one most logs are missing. Without it, closure happens verbally in a meeting and can't be distinguished from an item that was never closed at all.

Practical insight

Take next week's look-ahead and go through it once with the six tests, before the meeting rather than in it.

For each activity, ask the six questions in order: drawing, material, plant, labour, permit, access. Do not ask whether it is ready. Ask each one separately, because the whole point is that the word hides which of the six is missing.

Then count. If more than a third of the list fails at least one test, you are not looking at a plan, and no amount of chasing on Monday morning will turn it into one. Take those activities out, tell the meeting why, and let the look-ahead be shorter and true.

The second part is harder than the first, and it is the part that changes the project.

Key takeaways

• Ready is an adjective, and six departments use it about six different things.
• The six tests are already in the complaints: drawing, material, plant, labour, permit, access.
• Each test has a different owner, and none of the six can see the other five.
• A workfront view is not a planning technique. It is the one place all six are checked against one piece of work.
• Recording a constraint is half the job. Closure needs who, when, and what proves it.
• Unready work is rarely removed from the programme. It rolls into the next look-ahead, and the next.
• After a few months the look-ahead describes what the project wants rather than what the site will build. The two documents look the same.
• Writing the definition takes an afternoon. Getting six departments to be bound by it is the actual work.

Records born here. Workfront register · constraint log · ready work list.

What is coming next

Readiness decides whether work can start. The next question is what it costs while it runs, and that number comes from two places that rarely agree: the timesheet and the plant log.

Next week: hours and plant — allocation, availability, utilisation, and the difference between a man being present and a man being on your activity.