CAP·SPR · Schedule Performance Review
Your sanction baseline made a promise. The as-built, the progress reports, the field change log, and the completion records recorded what happened. CAP·SPR joins them all, measures the project against the commitment, and tests every explanation for why against your own records, so your closeout is evidence, not memory, and your benchmark record is a number rather than a story.
The post-investment review, computed, not recalled.
The problem
Most closeouts are a room full of memory and a binder that gets filed. Yet the reason the in-service date moved is already written down, scattered across records nobody joins up: the schedule, the earned-value reports, the change log, the completion certificates. Until the explanations are tested against those records, the closeout is a story, the benchmark record is a guess, and the same misses return on the next project.
What people remember and what the schedule records are rarely the same thing.
Without a measured cause, the fix is a slogan, and the slip comes back.
The sponsor asks what happened at the post-investment review, and the answer is a story, not a number.
What it measures
CAP·SPR task-matches the baseline frozen at G3 to the completed schedule, then measures the project at every level. Every figure is computed by the engine; the written account is validated against it, never the other way around.
Where the days were won and lost, from the whole project down to the single work package, with earned schedule read as a rate: SPI(t) beside the day counts.
What actually governed execution, how much of the planned path survived, and what entered and left it, procurement included.
The completed schedule’s earned hours against the reported actuals, by craft, so productivity is measured, not guessed.
Where the days went, to the day
The budget is additive and exact by construction: the named drivers plus the residual sum to the slip, to the day. What the tool will not do is absorb the remainder into a driver to make the picture tidy. Here the exchanger delivery is measurable, the rework it forced is measurable, and a residual remains, and that residual is a finding: days that went somewhere the schedule record cannot name. A review that quietly attributed them would be inventing a cause and calling it analysis.
Productivity by craft
Earned hours over reported actuals, construction phase. Reported only where the record covers enough of the hours to be meaningful.
Why it slipped
The engine raises the candidate explanations deterministically from the measurements themselves, procurement delay, field change growth, productivity, undermanning, a critical-path shift, discovered work, external events among them. Each hypothesis is then tested against the change log, the progress reports, and the completion records, and returns a verdict, supported, partially supported, unsupported, or insufficient evidence, with a stated confidence. What could not be established is said plainly, so you know exactly which answers deserve action.
The records we pull in
| Sanction baseline + as-built | Task-matched, so variance and the critical path are read against the frozen promise at G3. |
| Progress reports & earned value | The monthly earned-value record, normalized to craft for earned-over-actual productivity. |
| Field change log | Parsed to structured rows: dates, reasons, magnitudes. Corroborates where the added hours came from. |
| MC & turnover records | The completion ladder, certificate by certificate, so the end of construction is a date, not a claim. |
| Cost report against sanction | Client-supplied, read as indicative context, never treated as ground truth. |
The verdicts that come back
The signature analysis
CAP·SAR flags defects in a baseline before sanction. CAP·SPR closes the loop after handover: every flagged defect is traced through the task match to the specific as-built activities it touched, and the slip it echoes. A procurement-logic finding stops being a hygiene point and becomes a measured consequence, the loop a point-in-time review cannot close.
Did the plan predict reality
We score the sanction package’s own quality against the outcome it produced. Each risk the package carried is paired with what actually happened, and classified, so the readiness review that came before is held to account and the next one gets sharper.
Critical path · plan vs as-built
Flagged, then what happened
| Flagged at sanction | What actually happened |
|---|---|
| Readiness: Conditional | Missed the in-service date by 38 days Materialized |
| P1 procurement chain (Severe) | Exchanger arrived 19 days after the need date Materialized |
| C3 path reach (Material) | 22% of the planned critical path survived Materialized |
| Tie-in window fragment | Held: in-window scope completed inside the outage Held |
| Not flagged | Vendor data late for the control-system cutover Emerged unflagged |
The verdict that matters most is the one nobody asks for. A risk that emerged unflagged is a gap in the review method itself, and it is the only way the next sanction review gets better rather than merely longer.
What you get
The report ranks the credible causes by confidence and states what could not be established. The deliverable is a register of specific, owned actions in two tiers, next-project and systemic, each tied to a tested cause, and the benchmark record the closeout standard asks for: cost, schedule, definition score, and outcome, filed to the portfolio history. It closes the assurance loop into the post-investment review, and the coded outcomes build your benchmark over time.
Every number is computed by the engine behind a hard wall: the model weighs the evidence and writes the account, is validated against the figures, and never invents one. Any cost you supply is reported as indicative, never treated as ground truth.
CAP·SPR runs as a standalone review, or as the performance engine inside the CAP·AR4 closeout, where it opens the post-investment review on measured facts.
What changes
Your guide
CAP Intelligence is an independent assurance practice built from the owner’s side, across refining, petrochemicals, industrial gas, LNG, and power, as the owner accountable for the capital outcome and as the consultant brought in to protect it. It is the capital-projects practice of STO Intelligence LLC, and shares one spine with its turnaround practice.
Our methods stay at public-framework level, AACE, CII front-end planning practice, PMI, DCMA, and GAO, so every finding is defensible and nothing is a black box. You own the standard, not a proprietary score you cannot see inside.
Why CAP Intelligence
Empathy for the seat you are in, explaining an overrun at the post-investment review with nothing but recollections. Authority to settle it: the measured record, public frameworks, and owner-side experience of standing in that room.
Where this goes
The action register fixes the next project. Run it inside the CAP·AR4 closeout and the lessons become owned actions in CAP·PATH, landing on the next project’s own plan against the CAP·CORE standard, so what this project taught you never has to be relearned.
Send us the sanction baseline, the as-built, and the records you already keep. We will show you where the time went, why it went there, and how much confidence each answer deserves.