Challenges and pitfalls of Traffic Status Reporting

Running Head: PROJECT STATUS REPORTING
Challenges and pitfalls of Traffic Status Reporting
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1PROJECT STATUS REPORTING
Introduction:
This report will mainly focus on project status reporting that provides status of project,
portfolio and programs to various stakeholders of the project including team members, sponsors
and steering committee. Traffic status report is one of the method adopted by the project and
portfolio managers to rate project status (Kerzner, 2017). The three colors of traffic light
including red, yellow and green act as an indicator for various actions. The importance of traffic
status reporting lies in accumulating all status reports of the project into a single spreadsheet.
This enables senior management in an organization to identify projects that are in problem and
take quick actions to support them. However, challenges arises with respect to accuracy of
project managers to give genuine reports on project status. The following paragraphs will
enlighten more on the challenges and pitfalls that traffic light reporting experience.
Challenges and pitfalls of traffic status reporting:
The main challenge that RAG reporting face as discussed earlier is the accuracy of
project managers in giving genuine feedback to project status. This is due to lack of trust on
project managers. Lack of trust might happen because of two reasons. First, project managers
might not have required experience, knowledge, confidence and understanding of project status
to identify which project is heading towards red (Creasy & Anantatmula, 2013). The information
gap is either due to miscommunication between managers and contractors or lack of information
on project control systems. The project managers can adopt two reviewing methods to ensure
that information provided to project managers are accurate and fair. The two reviewing methods
are surveillance review and assurance review that might help to build confidence in project
managers. Project managers due to lack of proper information might mark a project green when
it needs to be marked amber or red (Hornstein, 2015). They might fear senior management’s