Project Jellybeans

One of our current intitiatives includes a requirement for recommendations for simple project status reporting. This is not new or surprising. But coming up again for another client who wants to start small, set me looking for some new references as to how other organisations do status reporting. Stop lights are an easy visual aid for status and they are supported by just about every project software package.

It was the reference to jellybeans rather than stop lights that caught my eye in the State of North Carolina IT PMO description. And in line with the start small and simple requirement, they provide a table of criteria as to whether your jellybeans should be red, yellow, green or grey for different measures of project health and definition.

My preference is always for automatic calculation of status as this removes the subjective element from the scoring - at least partially. However, for organisations where the processes are not mature enough to support automatic scoring, a clear definition of the criteria for determining status is essential.