Glossary
What is a RAG status?
A traffic-light health signal on delivery — on track, at risk, off track — that is a judgement by the person accountable, not a computation, and is only worth reading when the reasoning comes with it.
Computed status invites gaming and hides the interesting part: what changed, and what decision or help is needed. A RAG check-in that carries those two sentences is a governance signal; a bare green light is decoration.
What red, amber and green should actually mean
Green: the commitment as made still holds, and the person accountable would defend that in front of the people it was made to. Amber: it holds only if something specific happens — a dependency lands, a question gets answered, a person becomes available — and that something should be named in the same breath. Red: it does not hold, and the baseline needs to change.
Defined that way, amber is the most useful of the three, because it is the only one that carries an action. Where amber is treated as a soft red — a status people avoid to escape a conversation — a project goes green, green, green, red, and everyone learns nothing until it is too late to act.
Why a computed status is worse than a judged one
A status computed from ticket states measures the tracker, not the delivery. Everything can be in progress and on schedule while the one dependency that decides the outcome has not moved in three weeks — and the moment people know the formula, the inputs bend towards the output they want.
A judged status carries something no formula holds: what changed since last time, and what decision or help is needed now. Those two sentences are the entire value of a check-in. The colour is the index, not the content.
Related terms
- Delivery outcome — The explicit close of a commitment: what actually shipped, and — when the result is not a clean delivery — what differed from the promise.
- Honest close — Ending a commitment by comparison rather than checkbox: delivered as committed, delivered with named differences, or not delivered — the difference recorded in words whenever the result was not clean.
This definition comes from building DeliverySheet — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date.
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