In the past month or two, I've had a couple of emails from project managers that opened something like this... "David, I'm planning on reporting project [insert name] as red status this week for the following reasons [...] I just wanted to let you know and check that it is OK with you?" My reply in both cases was "Go for it!"

This came as quite a shock. It seems that it isn't culturally acceptable to report bad news and experienced PM's have made a career out of not doing so. Hence, the politically astute invitation for me to do something about it before the red status gets reported. So my response was unusual. What the PM's fail to realize is that I see red status as my friend.

In a world where everything is green and all projects are on schedule there is no appetite for change. In fact change is risky. Change creates a J-curve effect - things get worse before they get better. Change puts schedules at risk. Change turns green projects red. However, in a world where projects are already red, there is appetite for change. People expect managers to intervene and do something to fix the problems. Managers can take several directions but the two main intervention strategies are tactical/symptomatic fix, or strategic/root cause fix.

When urged by a PM to do something about red status, many function managers may be pushed in to reacting with a tactical/symptomatic fix that pulls the project out of red status quickly but leaves it in danger perhaps bouncing in and out of red status throughout its lifecycle. A strategic/root cause fix involves a change in methodology, a new process implementation, or significant cultural change. In order to have enough space to make such fundamental change and fix things for long term success, it may be necessary to have a portfolio dashboard that it lit up in red first. Tactical/symptomatic fixes may seem attractive - they are often easy to do and they keep everyone happy. However, they ultimately lead to much more effort and they don't represent the behavior of a truly high impact middle manager. True high impact performance comes from taking the time to make the strategic changes necessary so that further and continuous management intervention will not be necessary.

So the next time one of your projects turns red, don't panic! Red status can be your friend. Use its power as an enabler for true high impact sustainable process changes. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, Project+Management