Project management has a status problem

It was, by definition, a well-run meeting: The team got through its agenda in its allotted time, after which everyone received and filed the meeting notes.

Sadly, it demonstrated the difference between well-run and well-conceived: It was supposed to be a project status meeting, but that wasn’t how it turned out.

Instead, team members spent an hour listening to the outsourcer’s project manager report his view of the project’s status to the assembled virtual project team.

The problem? The temptation for an outside consultant engaged as a project manager to control the message is huge, especially when a project is straying out of Green status into more rickety territory.

But more than that, project managers who spend an hour a week letting the project team know the project’s status, well, their project status meetings — and for that matter the status meeting’s close kin, the dreaded project status report — are deadly wastes of time.

Yes, project managers need to report project status to project sponsors and stakeholders. That’s a different matter; project sponsors and stakeholders have every right to get an accurate bead on how a project is progressing.

But for project team members, understanding the true project status is a highly desirable byproduct of a well-run project status meeting — but not the main point.

What a well-conceived status meeting looks like

What project status meetings are for is to apply peer pressure to team members, motivating them to stick to the schedule.

So each team member reports the status of their assigned tasks to everyone else in the meeting — whether tasks that were supposed to have started actually did start; whether tasks that were supposed to have finished actually did finish; and whether in-process tasks are on track to complete when they’re supposed to.

Pro tip: In response to a team member reporting they’re behind schedule, the correct project manager response isn’t to express disappointment, criticize, or embarrass the miscreant. That’s just as well, because unlike the contract project manager, behind-schedule team members are client employees, meaning tact has to be a subtext of every unfortunate status fact.

What’s the correct response, then? It’s to ask, “What’s your plan for getting back on track?”

Project status stigma

This, by the way, hints at another common project management mistake: Incenting project managers to happy-face their project’s status.

It works like this: Every week, every project manager reports their project’s status to the PMO. Their project’s status is Green, Yellow, or Red. Green projects are on schedule, Yellow projects are in danger of slipping, and projects that are in the Red will, at best, come in late.

Bad stuff happens. Competent project managers know to ask themselves what has to happen to get their project back on track.

And so, competent project managers, reporting to competent project sponsors, develop a new plan, which replaces the original one.

That’s when things are done right. What happens all too often is that, new plan or no new plan, the project’s degraded status — and with it the project manager’s reputation — is a scarlet letter. The project — and the project manager — is branded Yellow or Red for the project’s duration.

The logic, if you can call it that, is that the original schedule is the schedule. If the project is going to slip, it’s in the Yellow from that point forward. If it’s going to slip a lot worse, then it’s in the Red forevermore.

There’s no recovery.

What should happen instead? The new plan shouldn’t be viewed as an appendix to the original one. The new plan should replace the old plan. Once the project sponsor has accepted it the old plan gets shredded and the new plan that replaces it is in the Green.

The true purpose of project status

Which leads to a healthier project status vocabulary, too: Green projects aren’t just forecast to adhere to the current schedule. More importantly, Green projects are in control. Yellow projects are at risk, not only of schedule slippages, but of spiraling out of control. Yellow projects need an updated plan — one that is in control. When the sponsor approves the updated plan, meaning a plan the project manager can adhere to, the project is in control … back in the Green.

Red projects are off the rails. They’re out of control. They can’t be salvaged in their current form. They’re forecast to never complete and need to be re-thought-out. Probably the project sponsor needs to pull the plug.

With these revised definitions there’s an inviolable rule that must be enforced: No project ever goes directly from Green status to Red status.

That’s because if a project does go directly from Green to Red, that means that for one or more weeks it was actually Yellow — at risk of slippage — before it went Red … out of control.

Red status is, that is, always avoidable, but only if the project manager recognizes Yellow status when it’s happening.

And can plan a revised plan of action without the stigma of owning a project that’s permanently in the Red.