The challenge
Catchment Civils was midway through delivering a £45 million wastewater capital programme for a major UK water utility. The programme covered ten sites across the Midlands, each in different phases of MEICA, commissioning, or capitalisation. Two planners maintained the master programme in MS Project. Every Friday, those planners spent four to six hours exporting the latest variance per site, building a PowerPoint deck for the client, and emailing it to twelve stakeholders.
The client repeatedly asked questions the planners could not quickly answer. How did variance compare to last week? Which sites had recovered ground? Which had drifted further? Each question triggered another four hours of spreadsheet work. By month seven, the client requested daily updates. The planners refused on grounds of resource.
The relationship was strained. The programme was on track, but the reporting failure was creating doubt that the contractor was on top of the work.
The solution
Catchment Civils onboarded No Slip in early March 2025. The setup took two hours. Their MS Project export mapping was completed once and saved. Their first Friday under the new process took 45 minutes start to finish: import the file, assign slippage reasons for three sites with variance, confirm. The dashboard updated immediately. The client got a shared link with read-only access.
From that point, the relationship reset. The client no longer needed weekly PowerPoint meetings because the dashboard was always current. The Friday cycle stabilised at 45 minutes including coffee. The planners reclaimed half a day per week.
By August, when one site (Long Marston WWTW) drifted −14 days due to subcontractor performance, the contractor had eleven weeks of contemporaneous slippage records showing the cause clearly attributed to procurement delays. The client accepted the EOT request without dispute.
Outcomes
- Weekly reporting time reduced from approximately 6 hours to 45 minutes
- Client moved from monthly review meetings to weekly self-service dashboard access
- 32 consecutive weeks of immutable snapshots captured by Q4 2025
- One EOT claim of 14 days defended successfully using No Slip records
- Estimated reporting cost saving: £18,000 per year per planner
“We used to spend Fridays building a deck that was out of date by Monday. Now the client sees what we see, when we see it. The conversations are different. We talk about delivery, not the report.”