The indicators that move first are all about decisions and interfaces, and none of them appears in a standard programme report.
Why it matters when the plan changes
Programme reporting measures completion against plan, which is a lagging indicator by construction: a task is late only after it was due. The things that predict lateness move earlier and are not counted, because the reporting format was designed around milestones. Cross-unit dependency is the weakest of the five clarities a plan depends on and it fails first: only 9% of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other functions all the time.
The tension is that leading indicators are softer and easier to argue with. A sponsor can dispute that escalations have risen in a way they cannot dispute a missed milestone, which is why the harder, later measure dominates. That argument is winnable only if the indicators are defined and counted rather than sensed, in the same way that priority is only real once resourced: only 11% of managers believe all their organisation's strategic priorities are properly funded.
In practice
A programme's milestones are all green in March. Decision latency has doubled since January, three decisions have reopened twice, and escalations to the sponsor have tripled. None is measured. In June two milestones slip, and the review concludes that the slippage was sudden.
Evidence
Cross-unit commitments are the least reliable part of execution, so their slippage is the earliest available signal.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)Most managers do not believe stated priorities are resourced, which is an observable condition well before delivery is affected.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)
What it cannot tell you
Leading indicators show that something is moving before delivery is affected; they do not show which of the five clarities is failing or why. Decision latency can rise because ownership is unclear, because priorities are unresourced, or because a dependency has broken. The indicators flag direction of travel, not cause.
Questions
Decision latency, how often decisions reopen, escalation volume to the sponsor, and whether cross-unit commitments are met on time. That last one matters most: research reported in Harvard Business Review in 2015 found only 9% of managers can rely on colleagues in other functions all the time.
Because programme reporting was designed around milestones, which are lagging by construction. A task is late only after its date passes. The measures that actually predict lateness concern decisions and interfaces, and no standard reporting format was ever built to count either of them.
From records that already exist: meeting minutes, decision logs, escalation emails and calendars. The counting is manual and cheap to do. The reason it is not done is that nobody owns doing it, rather than that it is in any way difficult.
Over-reacting to noise. Individual movements are ambiguous and most resolve into nothing, so response should scale with the signal, not with anxiety. Sull, Homkes and Sull's 2015 Harvard Business Review study found only 11% of managers believe priorities are properly resourced, a fact easy to over-read as crisis rather than baseline.
Typically one to two quarters ahead of milestone slippage, and two to three ahead of any financial effect. That interval is the whole point, because it is the period in which clarifying, resequencing or reassigning still works and descoping is not yet the only option.