The RAG (Red Amber Green) status goes up and down like a yoyo…green, green, amber, red, amber but trending green. I’ve sat in many a steering committee where overconfidence and the lack of articulating risk properly kept the statuses looking good. The programme was “on track” and the milestones were “ticking over”.
The only place you could see the cracks was in the people closest to the work. They looked tired. Overworked. Unable to absorb anything that came out of left field.
Have you asked the hard question, “Are we hiding something for the sake of a good status?”
Here’s what I’ve learnt through doing the hard yards: A RAG status tells you whether the plan is being followed. It does not tell you whether the change is landing. Those are two very different questions.
You can deliver every milestone on time and still end up with a transformation nobody adopts. The system goes live. The training happens. The launch email goes out. And three months later people have quietly built workarounds and kept the old spreadsheet. The promised benefits never show up.
The deck measures activity, but it rarely measures the reality on the ground.
So how do you read the real state of things? I’ve come to rely less on the dashboard and more on a handful of signals that tell you what’s genuinely happening underneath.
• Listen to the language people use. When a change is landing, people talk about it as “how we do things now”. When it isn’t, they still call it “the new system” months in. That small linguistic gap tells you whether it has become part of the furniture or is still an imposition.
• Watch what people do when no one is checking. Adoption under supervision is easy. Are they using the new process when the project team isn’t in the room? Or have the old processes crept back in?
• Count the workarounds. Every shadow spreadsheet, every “quick manual fix”, every export back into the old tool is a message. It’s people telling you the new way doesn’t yet serve them. We should never treat workarounds as a failure of discipline. They are valuable feedback that things are not working as envisaged.
• Ask the people two levels down. Sponsors and leads will often tell you what they believe is true. The person actually doing the task will tell you what is really happening.
• Track a benefit, not a milestone. Milestones prove you built the thing. Benefits prove you are achieving the outcomes you defined as success at the start. If the milestones are green but the benefit hasn’t moved, you have your answer.
None of this replaces proper governance. You still need the steering committee, the structure, the rhythm and the reporting.
The hardest part is that understanding the actual “state of affairs” often means hearing things you’d rather not. It means creating enough safety that someone can say “honestly, we’ve gone back to the old processes” without fear.
So next time you’re looking at a deck that says everything is fine on paper, do not be afraid to ask the question: When did you last talk to the person living the change?