Before you report
Status Report Evidence Checker
Check whether each reported green, amber or red is supported by the numbers in the same report, and see first the ones that are green on the outside only.
Read status reports as .xlsx or .csv, one row per project, inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Status reports
Drop a spreadsheet here
One row per project, with the reported status and whatever numbers the report carries: milestone dates, budget and forecast, high risks, critical issues, progress.
Green on the outside
A status report carries two things: the color someone chose, and the numbers that should justify it. Usually they agree. When they do not, it is almost always the same way round: a green report whose milestone is six weeks late, or whose forecast is well over budget. Program offices call these watermelons. The tool reads both halves of every report and puts the ones that disagree first.
The evidence it reads
The next milestone’s forecast date against its baseline. The forecast at completion against the budget. The number of open high risks and open critical issues. Percent complete against planned percent complete. Whatever the report carries is used; whatever it does not is left out, and a report with no numbers at all is listed as having nothing to check.
Your rules, shown
How many days late makes a milestone amber, how far over budget makes cost red: those are rules, and every organization has its own. The defaults are common thresholds and nothing more. Every rule is on the page and can be changed, and the evidence the tool found is always shown beside the color it produced, so nobody has to take the verdict on trust.
More cautious than the numbers
A report can be redder than its numbers for good reason: a key person leaving, a supplier in trouble, something the figures cannot carry. The tool notes these without calling them wrong, because the fix is a sentence in the report saying what the numbers miss.
What this does not do
It never changes a reported status, and it cannot see what a report leaves out. A report can be greener than its numbers for good reason too, such as a recovery plan already agreed. The verdict is about whether the report and its own evidence agree, not about whether the project is healthy.