Prevent Watermelon Projects

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Watermelon projects are superficially green on the outside — everything looks fine on the status dashboard. But dig inside and they are bleeding red. So when traditional reporting metrics fail, how do you identify these watermelons and prevent them from growing? Here are three better measures that can help.

In “Watermelon Projects” (March 24, 2014), we explained the concept and a few types you are likely to encounter. The next step is to examine how to prevent watermelon projects from growing in the first place, and how to know if the fruit you are holding is going to cause you trouble or not.

Every project portfolio has a few projects that are in trouble. These are the projects that show up red on a project dashboard and invite extra scrutiny from executives and senior management.  What we are focusing on here is a class of project that has the opposite problem; they appear fine on the outside, but if you look close enough you’ll find that they really are in jeopardy. We call these kinds of projects “watermelons” — they are green on the outside, red on the inside.  And it can take slicing one open to know the difference.

One reason why projects become watermelons is organizational emphasis and reporting on project metrics that don’t actually expose the true health of a project. Most reporting looks at traditional …

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