1. Establish a credible baseline
Use accepted deliverables, verifiable progress, contractual commitments, actual capacity and constraints. Aggregate completion percentages are not enough if they do not show what is genuinely usable.
2. Rebuild the critical path
Map technical, decision, vendor, environment, data and change dependencies. Give each dependency an owner, required date, risk signal and viable fallback.
3. Govern decisions and recovery
Open a decision log with options, recommendation, delay impact, decision maker and date. Choose Scrum, predictive or hybrid delivery according to uncertainty and constraints, then agree scenarios, trade-offs, quality gates and exit criteria.
| Signal | Intervention |
|---|---|
| Unverifiable status | Baseline on accepted deliverables |
| Dependencies without owners | Map and named accountability |
| Decisions stalled | Decision log with deadlines |