Reporting history check
It does not ask whether the project is healthy. It asks whether the reporting on it has ever produced a signal, across the whole history rather than this month.
The seamThe board reading a status report and the reporting system that has produced the same answer every period since the project started.
This does not tell you whether your project is healthy. You already know that, and a colour computed from weights nobody can justify would not add to it. It asks a different question: across the whole reporting history, has the reporting ever produced a signal?
A control that has never fired is not evidence of safety. It is an absence of evidence, and it reads the same as safety on a dashboard. A gate that has never been failed is not a control, and every programme performs well against a baseline it can move. A health report aggregates both, which is why it is the last place either shows up.
Months, quarters, boards, whatever the report actually goes to. The unit does not matter as long as it is the same one throughout.
Only used for the rebaselining arithmetic below. One is fine.
Reporting history
2026-10-01. projects-advisors.com/tools/project-health
Across 24 reporting periods, 5 of 5 indicators have never changed once. Computed in the browser at projects-advisors.com/tools/project-health
| Has never moved | What that is evidence of |
|---|---|
| The delivery confidence or RAG rating | A rating that has never changed has never told anybody anything they did not already assume. It is a description of the reporting, not of the project. |
| The forecast cost at completion | A forecast that has not moved across the whole history is not a stable forecast. It is one nobody has re-run. |
| The baseline, reset or rebaselined | No reset recorded. That is either unusual, in a way worth being able to explain, or it is not being counted. The arithmetic below says how unusual. |
| A gate or stage review not passed | No review has ever produced a stop. A gate that cannot fail is a milestone with a meeting attached. |
| The top risk on the register changing | The same risk has been top throughout. Either nothing has been done about it, or the register is not being used to manage anything. |
| Indicator | Changes | Per period |
|---|---|---|
| The delivery confidence or RAG rating | 0 | 0 |
| The forecast cost at completion | 0 | 0 |
| The baseline, reset or rebaselined | 0 | 0 |
| A gate or stage review not passed | 0 | 0 |
| The top risk on the register changing | 0 | 0 |
No baseline reset across 1 project. GAO estimated that 48% of a sample of 180 of 778 major federal IT projects planned for 2008 had been rebaselined. At that rate the chance of seeing none across 1 project is 52%. So either this portfolio is genuinely unlike that population, which is possible and should be explicable, or resets are not being counted as resets.
What travels with that number. The reference rate is from GAO-08-925, a survey of federal information technology projects in the United States planned for 2008, with a 99% response rate. Not construction, not this decade, not this region. It is used because it is the largest published rate we have found, and because turning a suspicion into a figure produces an argument about whether the population fits, which is a better argument than the one nobody was having. There is deliberately no threshold on any rate above: no published source separates a healthy rate of change from an unhealthy one, the rate depends heavily on how long a period is, and the line is the reader's to draw.
Computed from
- GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide, GAO-20-195G, March 2020 (GAO-20-195G, March 2020; read 2026-08-24)https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-195g
- GAO Schedule Assessment Guide, GAO-16-89G, December 2015 (GAO-16-89G, December 2015; read 2026-09-01)https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-16-89g
- Infrastructure and Projects Authority, assurance review toolkit (gov.uk collection, hosted under the historic name; gov.uk records that the IPA was replaced by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) in April 2025; read 2026-08-27)https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/infrastructure-and-projects-authority-assurance-review-toolkit