The Problem with RAG

RAG status — Red, Amber, Green — is the lingua franca of project reporting. Almost every project management tool uses it. Almost every project manager distrusts it.

The problem is not the colours. It is that a single RAG label hides the dimension that is actually at risk. A project can be green on budget and red on team morale simultaneously. A single aggregate status forces the reporter to make a judgment call that obscures the signal the reader actually needs.

Research interviews with project managers, delivery leads, and clients confirmed a consistent pattern: the most dangerous projects are the ones that look green until they suddenly aren't. The driver is almost always a people signal — a team member quietly disengaging, a client losing confidence — that never surfaces in financial or delivery metrics until it is too late.

Three Health Dimensions

The monitor tracks health across three independent dimensions, each with its own RAG and trend line:

Finance — burn rate versus budget, forecast accuracy over the last three periods, and current margin against target. Finance health is the most objective dimension — it either adds up or it doesn't.

Delivery — milestone completion rate, scope change velocity, and blocker age. A project delivering on time but with an accelerating backlog of unresolved blockers is not healthy; delivery health surfaces that.

People — Net Promoter Score from three separate groups: the client, the core team, and any external partners. These are collected via a lightweight pulse check — a single question, a 0–10 scale — sent on a defined cadence. Separating the three groups matters: a disengaged team and a dissatisfied client are very different problems with very different responses.

Composite Score

Above the three dimensions, a single composite score gives the portfolio-level read. The composite is a weighted average: 40 % finance, 30 % delivery, 30 % people. The weights are configurable per project type — a time-and-materials engagement weights finance more heavily; a fixed-price product build weights delivery.

The composite is deliberately not RAG. It is a 0–100 score with a trend arrow. This discourages the human tendency to treat amber as "basically fine" — a score of 62 trending downward from 74 is a signal that a single amber label would not carry.

Trend Is the Point

Every metric is shown as a sparkline over the last six reporting periods alongside the current value. The design principle: the direction matters more than the number. A finance health of 71 % rising from 58 % three months ago is a different situation from a finance health of 71 % falling from 88 %. The same number, opposite stories.

Hovering a sparkline reveals the full history and the period-on-period delta, giving project managers the context to explain the number in a client conversation rather than just reading it off a screen.

Alert Logic

The monitor generates alerts when:

• Any dimension drops below 50 (critical threshold)
• Any dimension falls more than 15 points in a single period
• Finance forecast accuracy diverges from actuals by more than 10 %
• No pulse check response has been received for more than two consecutive periods

Alerts appear as a count badge on the project card in the portfolio view and expand into an action panel when the project is opened — showing the trigger, the date, and a free-text field for the project manager to log their response.