Anticlue

It?s yellow, might even be red, but it sure isn?t green

Our organization is moving towards a project management organization. One of the steps of this process, is that for all IT related projects there is a project summary bulletin board or dashboard to be correct. On this dashboard, we have a bi-weekly summary of the projects that are capital projects, meaning someone budgeted money for the project and the money got approved. Currently, IT just fills out the list, I believe it needs to be a responsibility of the entire community, but that is just my conjucture.

Any way, the list is now being rigorously reviewed. There are three categories:
Green - good life is great
Yellow - warning caution problems exist
Red - we are a ship that is sinking over here

Anyway, yesterday was my time to review the project list with the new keeper of the data. I have a couple of projects and they are in various green stages. However, I was lucky enough a couple weeks ago to inherit another project that was yellow (really red). The problem with the project is that there are two different camps that believe there are two different levels of work. So we are in the process of negotiating with the two camps the work needed to be done, and when resources will be available. This is a political process, not one that really can be captured in the light of green, yellow, and red. The fact that we were actually talking on what needed to be done, and not firmly entrenched in camps, I put the project to green. Explaining that to the new keeper was just funny, never really ever saw a look that captured the facial expressions of being perplexed, so wonderfully.

I guess, in places where project management is actually a practiced discipline this makes no sense setting the project to green. However, here at the newbie growing stage there needs to be a clearly defined set of requirements that states the colors of the stop light. This way when the colors are set the criteria is the same.