Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
I'm interested in how you categorise projects with colours. We use RAG: Red, Amber, Green. We also use Blue for closed projects. It is a system with a number of limitations because project managers generally try to record everything as green.
I have heard of others using ROYG: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green (and I'm keen to understand the difference between orange and yellow). And I wonder if anyone uses Black for truly difficult projects requiring rescuing.
What do you use and does it work? Saving Changes...
Red Amber Green here, however one issue with this that I have run into is where heavily paper-based organisations have banned colour printing, so at board meetings all statuses are grey. Adding "Green" etc in a white font to the status boxes has managed to confuse people before too. I wonder about moving away from Red Amber Green towards descriptive statuses, maybe using "On Target " for "Green"... any ideas for what to use for Amber and Red? Saving Changes...
Sunando ChaudhuriDirector - PMO & Governance| ModonDist: Burdwan, West Bengal, India
Thanks Elizabeth for bringing up this subject.
RAG & Blue for us too. On one of the programs I introduced Grey for milestones not started yet. In my organization, it is better to sometime report as Amber or Red sometime to get more management traction as otherwise getting support in a large matrix organization is very difficult.
@ Tim - Yellow - Milestone at Risk; Red - Milestone missed (obviously the next chart needs to describe the actions to get to Green :))
I am waiting for more suggestions.
Saving Changes...
Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
We also have the problem of printing in black and white. At our project board meetings I can get round this by taking a projector and my laptop and putting the status report up on the wall, but that's not practical all the time. I like the idea of naming different shades of grey! Saving Changes...
Ravi AnandProject Manager| Fujitsu ConsultingPune, India
We are using green for task completed, Red which need attention and Gray which is in Process.......... Saving Changes...
We don't colour-code here ; we use weather indicators: sunny, cloudy, or stormy. At least you don't have to worry about printing in black and white, and the meaning is pretty much universally understood.
I guess using smileys and frownies would also work. Saving Changes...
Jim DearingSr. IT Program Manager| Wellpoint Inc.Denver, Co, United States
I've talked to my EPMO about letting us use Brown.
Self explanatory. Saving Changes...
Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
Julien, I've never thought about weather indicators before. Guess you could also include snowy (for frozen, no progress being made) and hurricane (so many changes we can't keep up)! Saving Changes...
Alan CaseySenior Project Manager| Ford Motor Credit CompanyDewitt, Mi, United States
@Julian, Love the weather indicators concept!
As a color blind (colour blind) person, eveything looks grey scale to me. I like to use a traffic light icon. In the US, everyone knows that green is on the top, red is on the bottom, and amber is in the middle. That allows people to correctly interpret the color codes when printing grey scale on a B/W printer. Saving Changes...
Mark Price PerryBusiness Driven PMO Evangelist| BOT InternationalOrlando, Fl, United States
Great questions and very interesting and creative responses and tips. Just a quick tip, the conditional formatting feature of Microsoft Project provides RAG indicators that contain the corresponding smiley face (upward smile, downward frown, and neutral flat smile) so that when printed in black and white or viewed by folks that are color blind, the RAG indicators can still be understood. Saving Changes...
Jorge MaturanaGerente Planificación y Control TI| Holding FalabellaSantiago, Chile
I see and feel the colors differently by dyschromatopsia. In people this is more common than everyone thinks. Could there be a more general color coding that takes into consideration this problem?
