Plans rarely fail in one dramatic moment. They drift: a little further from reality every day, until the gap is too big to hide.
What drift looks like
- A task marked in progress with no commits for six days.
- A task marked done while the tasks depending on it are still blocked.
- A task past its due date that nobody has touched.
- A delay mentioned in chat that never reached the plan.
None of these is a crisis on its own. Together, they are why the launch review turns into a surprise.
Why people miss it
Drift is quiet. Nobody announces that they stopped working on a task. The signals are spread across tools: commits in one place, chat in another, the plan in a third.
Rules that catch it
You do not need AI to detect most drift. Simple, testable rules do the job:
- Stale activity: in progress, no linked activity in N days.
- Broken order: done, but with blocked dependents.
- Overdue: past due and not done.
Where AI helps is in explaining the mismatch in plain words and linking it to evidence, so the alert says why, not just what.
Act on it early
A drift alert is only useful if it leads to a decision: re-plan, re-assign, or confirm the task is fine. The cheapest time to make that decision is the day the drift starts.
Setting thresholds
The right number of days for a stale-activity rule depends on the work. A two-day task with no activity for three days is a concern; a two-week task might not be. Start conservative, for example five working days, and tune it after a few weeks based on how many alerts turned out to matter.
Avoid alert fatigue
An alert nobody trusts is worse than no alert. Keep the rules few, show the evidence with every alert, and let people dismiss an alert with a reason so the rules can be tuned. Precision matters more than catching everything.
A weekly drift review
- List every open drift alert.
- Check the ones on the critical path first.
- For each, decide: re-plan, re-assign, or confirm it is fine.
- Record the decision so the same alert does not come back unanswered.
Keel runs drift rules against your plan and activity and shows each alert with its evidence. See launch health and drift.
