This piece was written for enterprise technology leaders and originally published on the Wednesday Solutions mobile development blog . Wednesday is a mobile development staffing agency that helps US mid-market enterprises ship reliable iOS, Android, and cross-platform apps — with AI-augmented workflows built in. Status updates that always say on track are not a sign of a smooth project. They are a sign of a vendor that is not surfacing risk. Here is how to find out what is actually happening. "On track" is the most common phrase in a mobile vendor's weekly update. It is also the least informative. On track against what schedule? On track as of when? On track according to whose assessment of the underlying work? When every update says on track and a deadline is then missed, the problem is not that something unexpected happened. It is that the information system the vendor was running was not designed to surface risk — it was designed to manage it out of sight.…