ATLANTA, July 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SmartPM, construction’s leading schedule analytics platform, has officially released its second annual State of Construction Scheduling 2026 report, with central findings pointing to a steep distrust in construction schedules across owners, general contractors, consultants, and trades.
“The schedule is the one asset every project produces and almost nobody believes. When owners don’t trust what they are handed, entire contract relationships are running on polite skepticism rather than shared facts. We built SmartPM to give our customers accurate schedule data their teams can stand behind together,” said Michael Pink, CEO of SmartPM.
Now in its second year, the report has expanded well beyond its inaugural edition. This year’s analysis draws on more than 120,000 schedule files from SmartPM’s data warehouse alongside roughly 10,000 survey responses spanning general contractors, owners, consultants, subcontractors, project controls professionals, and schedulers across the industry. It adds a first-of-its-kind study of thousands of real historic schedules, and evaluates the industry’s assumptions about what drives delay.
CEO Mike Pink shares that the attitude toward faulty schedules is why SmartPM was founded: to empower teams with the data they need to create and maintain reliable schedules. “Owners and contractors have been butting heads for a hundred years, and now I watch them get along, because for the first time they are arguing from the same truth. When both sides believe the data, and get real time analytics from the schedule, the end-of-job fire drill fades and the relationship survives an imperfect project,” Pink shared.
Key Report Findings:
- Only 2% of owners are very confident in the schedules they receive, and just 24% of general contractors trust their own updates to reflect field reality.
- Projects that slip without a recovery response finish roughly two and a half times worse.
- The data suggests a roughly threefold gap between how teams rate their schedules and how those schedules measure in practice.
- Project Delay is curbed by upwards of 60% when deploying advanced schedule analytics technology in a systematic way at the executive, management and site levels.
SmartPM’s inaugural report exposed how rarely construction schedules are used as strong strategic assets, while the new study refocuses conversations around trust and timing. A clear warning of a blown project hinges on whether a team catches a slip while a fix is still affordable, a signal visible mid-project and well before most crews act on it.
“The trouble almost always shows up in the data long before anyone acts on it, and by the time a slip becomes a conversation piece, the cheap window to fix it has usually closed. The teams that win are the ones reading the signal early, and that only works when they believe what the schedule is telling them,” said Rohit Sinha, CTO and Co-founder of SmartPM.
The State of Construction Scheduling 2026 report delivers 41 pages of survey data, and is available for download now at smartpm.com.
About SmartPM Technologies
SmartPM is an AI-driven Automated Project Controls and Schedule Analytics solution built for construction. From complex project portfolios down to surfacing valuable insights, the platform delivers automated advanced analytics, comprehensive dashboards, and reporting that improve accuracy, predict outcomes, and keep construction timelines on track. With a cloud-based, unlimited-user model, SmartPM fits operations of any scale while keeping stakeholders informed and reducing risk. Learn more and book a demo at www.smartpm.com.
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