I am developing a status report which will show "Project Health" using Red, Amber, Green (RAG). We primarily use waterfall for Project Management and therefore once a project date on the critical path slips, it is almost never made up. We update and communicate the delay on the status report when the slip is first realized, reporting overall project health as either Red or Amber (depending upon the severity of the delay). Will the project forever be delayed and show project health as red or amber or do you re-baseline, communicate and reset to project health to green? Saving Changes...
If you can't fast track or crash the schedule, you have a new delivery date. Effective change management practices should apply to both planned and unplanned changes. If you're going to miss the original delivery date, is the project still worth doing? Will it produce less value, cause the company to miss out on a valuable opportunity or a compliance deadline, or delay something else that is equally or more important?
If the impact of delay is minimal, re-baseline and make it green. If the impact is big but you have to keep going, anyway, the stated project health should, IMO, reflect the impact to the organization. You don't want a watermelon status, where you say things are green because you've re-baselined and are now on track with the new schedule, but it's red on the inside because you've caused damage that can't be undone. Saving Changes...
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Scott, in principle, I agree with Aaron's feedback.
In a waterfall environment, it can indeed be challenging to make up delays, especially if you strictly follow a sequential process where phases or tasks depend heavily on each other. Saving Changes...
By the book, re-baselining to enable the schedule health to return to green should only happen if a formal change was accepted. A schedule or cost variance is NOT a change.
However, I have worked for companies where to avoid impacting the morale of all stakeholders, once it was confirmed that a delay could not be made up, the PM was given permission to re-baseline.
Even in such cases, it is a good idea as part of the project closeout AND as part of PMO metrics reporting to summarize progress against the original baseline or at least a baseline which does not forgive that variance.
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