Project coordination & accountability

Catch the delay while you can still prevent it.

Projects rarely fail on one big event. They bleed out through small, unseen delays that nobody escalates — until accounting finds them weeks later, when the money is already gone. MPC turns everyday coordination into a system of accountability: deadlines that escalate themselves, a record that can’t be quietly changed, and one personal wall that shows each person exactly what needs their action.

A peer-reviewed coordination model, in development at Indicio d.o.o. — 30+ years in construction software.

The problem

The slip you see at month-end already happened.

In construction and other multi-party projects, the real risk isn’t a single catastrophe — it’s the steady accumulation of small delays that stay invisible until their cumulative cost is significant. By the time a number lands in a financial report, the chance to act has passed.

30–78% of a month’s costs were missing from month-end reports. 10-year field study of a real deployment (129,335 invoices). Bačun, OFEL 2019.
+4.64% cost overrun for every year of delay; 9 of 10 megaprojects overrun. Flyvbjerg, Project Management Journal, 2014.
#1 cause of project failure a third of the time — ineffective communication. PMI, Pulse of the Profession, 2013.

Existing tools are good at helping you record what happened. The harder problem is making the right person aware of an approaching deadline before it slips — and making sure the record of who knew what, and when, can be trusted afterwards. That is the problem MPC is built for.

How it works

Three capabilities the leading tools still don’t offer.

We have compared MPC’s core against the documentation of the leading project and work-management tools. For these three capabilities, we find no documented out-of-the-box equivalent.

Wedge 1

Escalating deadline alerts

An approaching deadline raises a yellow flag; a missed one turns red — and the alert travels up the reporting line to supervisors and sideways to the peers it affects. No one has to remember to escalate; the structure does it automatically.

Wedge 2

An immutable audit trail

Every action is logged with a system timestamp and the identity of who made it. Entries are append-only — no one can quietly change the date or rewrite history. Accountability that holds up to procurement scrutiny.

Wedge 3

One unified work wall (MyRFAwall)

Each person gets a single personal feed that pulls together everything needing their action across four dimensions at once — the projects they’re on, their place in the org, the external partners involved, and the topic at hand. Not four separate lists.

Supporting this: safe external participation — subcontractors and suppliers can be invited onto a topic, with a per-post internal/external flag controlling exactly what they see. The model has been in production within Indicio’s ERP for years; MPC packages it as a focused, standalone product.

How to evaluate a coordination layer

Four tests worth applying to any tool that claims to keep a project coordinated.

CapabilityThe test to applyWhy it decides outcomes
Preemptive, escalating alerts Do at-risk and overdue items escalate automatically up the reporting line and sideways to affected peers — or only notify the assignee? Coordination fails silently when only the assignee sees the warning; the chain must know before the deadline, not after.
A tamper-evident audit trail Is history append-only and immutable — or admin-editable / purgeable on a retention timer? Procurement and dispute defensibility (e.g. EU PPDS) require a record no one can quietly alter or delete.
A multi-dimensional personal feed Does one personal view aggregate work across project + reporting line + external partner + topic at once — or collapse to a single-axis “my tasks” list? Obligations cut across all four axes; a single-axis feed hides the cross-cutting ones until they slip.
Per-message confidentiality Can internal/external visibility be set per post — or only per object/role when a guest is invited? Real threads mix internal and external participants; coarse role-scoping over-shares or forces parallel channels.

MPC was built to meet all four. The supporting research is in the dossier →

Research & validation

A model the academic world has scrutinised since 2013.

MPC isn’t a freshly-invented feature list. Its model was first published in 2013 and refined across more than a decade of double-peer-reviewed papers in construction, economics and risk management — presented on four continents and independently cited.

14peer-reviewed papers
2013first published
4continents presented
15+independent citations
Highlights · ICEC–PAQS 2018, Sydney Three minutes drawn from the 31-minute World Congress talk — the corporate disruptions that derail project schedules, the model that folds everyday corporate work into the plan, and the predictive horizon it opens.
ICEC World Congress · 2016 · 2018 · 2022

Presented three times at the world’s apex body for cost engineering.

The International Cost Engineering Council (founded 1976) reaches more than 300,000 cost engineers and project managers across 120+ nations. Dinko Bačun presented at three of its World Congresses — most fully at ICEC–PAQS 2018 in Sydney, where the four coordination dimensions behind MPC were set out on stage.

That talk also shows where the model leads: once every request carries its own duration, an enterprise’s interleaved schedules become measurable — and the probability that a deadline will be met can be calculated.

Highlights · ICEC–PAQS 2018 (3 min). The predictive-scheduling work is the research foundation MPC is built on, not a feature of today’s product — the full reasoning, and the complete 31-minute talk, are in the research dossier →

MATREFC · Dubrovnik · 2013Cited 5×

Multidimensional Preemptive Coordination in Construction

The founding paper — the News Wall, the append-only audit trail, and alerts that escalate vertically and horizontally.

Read the paper (PDF)
OFEL · Dubrovnik · 2014Cited 5×

A Model of Multidimensional Interdisciplinary Corporate Coordination

Brings external suppliers and subcontractors safely onto the wall, with per-post visibility control. The four feed dimensions are named here.

View on Google Scholar
IJIMT · Sapporo, Japan · 2017Int’l journal

Coordination in Multi-Project Construction Environments

Horizontal, vertical and diagonal coordination across many concurrent projects, with a verifiable audit trail.

Read the paper (PDF)
OFEL · Dubrovnik · 2019

Temporal Anomalies in Budgetary Cost Control

The 10-year field study: month-end reports routinely missed 30–78% of a month’s costs — the evidence behind “you find the slip too late.”

Read the study
OFEL · Dubrovnik · 2015Cited 3×

MPC as a Collaborative Risk-Management Tool

The same engine extended into enterprise risk — requests carry risk codes and thresholds, turning coordination into a live early-warning system.

Read the paper (PDF)
OFEL · Dubrovnik · 2016Cited 2×

Automated Risk-Trigger Detection in an Alert System

Ratio-based triggers sampled from live operational data that raise and route alerts the moment a threshold is breached.

Read the paper

Get the MPC Research Dossier

A curated PDF tracing the model from its 2013 foundations through the 10-year field study to the ICEC–PAQS 2018 scheduling extension — the “what,” the “why it matters,” and where it leads.

  • The original Multidimensional Preemptive Coordination paper
  • The 129,335-invoice cost-visibility field study
  • The ICEC–PAQS 2018 extension — how coordination becomes predictive across an enterprise’s schedules
  • A one-page map of the model to its three rare capabilities

One email with the PDF. No spam, unsubscribe anytime. — Indicio d.o.o.

30–78%
of monthly costs missing from month-end reports in a real 10-year study.

2013
when MPC’s core was first published — still rare today.

See the full publication list on Google Scholar →

The company

Built by people who’ve run construction software for 30 years.

MPC is a new product — but not a new idea, and not a new team. It comes from Indicio d.o.o., a Croatian software company whose coordination model has been running inside its own enterprise ERP for years. MPC takes that proven core and packages it as a focused, standalone product for the world beyond our home market.

1992Founded as Tendriks — award for software innovation; first client Konstruktor Inženjering, then Croatia’s largest civil-engineering firm.
1995Among the first in Croatia to build cost-center accounting into business software.
2000sCarpio — the move to Windows; our first internal coordination app, MPC’s direct ancestor.
2013Indicio — the move to SaaS and the web; soon after, all IP consolidated under one company.
2016–22Three papers presented at ICEC World Congresses — the global apex of cost engineering — including Sydney 2018.
Let’s talk

If this is your problem, we should talk.

MPC is being readied for its first deployments. If your projects bleed out through unseen delays — and you want coordination you can actually hold people accountable to — we’d like to hear from you.

Request a walkthrough

or email hello [at] mpcoord [dot] com