Operational record for projects that run across companies
Vigil reads the conversation around a job and tells you what it does to the programme.
It never changes a plan, and it says when it is unsure.
In the group, Tuesday
“Furniture only by the 20th, boss — the veneer got held up”
In Vigil, Tuesday
Furniture delivery → 20 Sep
Handover moves 11 days. Site work waits on wardrobes.
Flagged, not changedWhy nobody saw it coming
A job hands over late, and it was visible for eleven days.
A job hands over late, and nobody saw it coming.
Why? The thing that slipped went unnoticed for eleven days.
Why? It slipped in a conversation, not in a system — a message, a call, a line in a group.
Why? The conversation runs across four or five companies who don’t share a system, and the programme lives in a sixth place none of them opens.
Why? Keeping the two in step is somebody’s job, done by hand, after the work is finished.
Why? No tool reads the conversation and the programme as one thing.
The record and the plan are maintained separately, by a person, after the fact.
Which is why the fix isn’t a better tracker or a better chat app. It’s one system that reads both.
What it reads
Nobody joins anything. Nobody files anything.
Connected and threaded against the job. Every message filed where it belongs.
Messages
Read nightly, per group, per project. Summarised, with what’s still open carried forward — so the days build on each other rather than starting again.
Documents
Understood on arrival, not just stored. What it is, what it says, when it expires. That understanding is kept.
Everyone it meets
Contacts start uncategorised, because Vigil won’t decide who someone is to you. You make the groups.
The record is a by-product of work already happening. If it needed maintaining, it would decay — so it doesn’t need maintaining.
And it keeps looking
Every job, every night, whether or not anybody asked.
Nothing here was reported by a person. Each of these was found in a message, an inbox or a date that came and went.
What it works out
A programme with real dependencies, not a picture of one.
Activities, links, float, critical path. Move one date and the chain re-runs — every dependent activity, four steps down if that’s how far it reaches.
A date somebody states in a message becomes a projection. It moves the forecast, names what else moved, and is one click to dismiss.
The projection moves. The plan does not.
What it won’t do
Uncategorised is a state, not a failure.
A contact Vigil has seen but can’t place stays uncategorised. It won’t decide who someone is to you.
An attachment that arrived near a message says sent 3 minutes after — not this belongs to that.
A date read out of a sentence becomes a projection. It never becomes the plan.
It never changes your records on its own.
When Vigil isn’t certain, it says so.
Every competitor in this category is claiming more automation. This is the one claiming less, on purpose.
Who it’s for
One product. Three ways of working.
You know where every unit is. You don’t know which ones stopped moving.
Your progress report is accurate every morning, and silent. It won’t tell you that 144 units cleared design and never started, or that the two units on hold are three times the size of an average one.
The deadline everyone watches is the opening date. The deadline that governs is rent commencement. Vigil counts against the second.
The cleared-but-idle gap
Design received against in fit-out. The difference is the largest number on the page and the only one without a bar of its own.
On hold, weighted
“2 on hold” reads as trivial. Two large-format units can be a tenth of the leasable area.
Movement
A daily report with no delta is a photograph. Nothing in it tells you what hasn’t changed in eleven days.
Same engine. The vocabulary, the stages and the documents change; the maths doesn’t.
Same team, same week
Different Tuesday.
Nobody on the team does anything differently. That’s the whole point.
How this gets built
We don’t manufacture certainty we don’t have.
We don’t take a decision that belongs to a person.
We show our working.
We refuse rather than guess.
We don’t make the record someone’s job.
These aren’t aspirations. Each one is enforced in the code, and each one is a decision to do less than the category standard.
Being straight about it
Three templates. Three workspaces, two active. Five live projects. One architecture practice using it on a real job.
It’s early, and you’d be seeing it early. That’s the honest position.