Although almost every project uses this paradigm, Red, Yellow, Green status is not very useful unless implemented in a certain way. The following suggestions are ways to improve the effectiveness of using this kind of status indicator.
1 – Define Red, Yellow, Green in terms of its most common perceived use (timeline).
2 – Expand the color coded status paradigm to report on more than just tracking to plan.
3 – Pull the emotion out of the color coding.
We talked about item 1 in a previous post. We’ll use this post to discuss item 2, and leave item 3 for a following blog post.
Most often, red, yellow, green is implied to indicate how an initiative is tracking to plan. That’s fine, but tracking to plan (or schedule adherence) is only one element of a healthful project, and is hardly the most important element.
In IT project management (and often in other disciplines), there are 3 levers that can be pulled to change the dynamics of a project:
1) Schedule
2) Scope
3) Quality
You can compromise scope or quality to adhere to a schedule. And if scope and/or quality are more important than a date, than reporting status on dates only, is a poor indicator of project health. However, it’s almost always what red, yellow, green is implying.
There is a better way… The creation of a dashboard that looks at a project in high level, color coded, simple concepts can convey far more information than a single status indicator. Expanding past the three categories listed above is recommended. For example, a weekly status report could report “Red”, “Yellow”, “Green” status on a series of project health indicators, such as:
1) Schedule
2) Scope
3) Quality
4) Budget
5) Resources
And then all of that get’s wrapped into an “Overall” status. In my previous post, I said that color coding only works if each status indicator has well defined and socialized metrics behind it. This applies to all status indicators. So for each of the 5 criteria, and in turn the overall indicator, there needs to be rules for why it is Red, Yellow, or Green.
This discipline increases the effectiveness of the status reporting process because the report creator must think critically on what the status really means, and where the problems are at. It also encourages the recipients to acknowledge that projects can be complex organisms which require constant tuning to approach a successful outcome.
