A programme can report green every week for a year and change no behaviour at all. Green measures whether the plan is being executed. It does not measure whether anything is different.
01 What a status report actually measures
Activity against plan. Milestones hit, spend against budget, risks with owners. Every one of those can be true while the organisation carries on exactly as before, because none of them asks the only question that matters: is anyone doing the work differently?
02 Three green lights that mean nothing on their own
Milestones delivered. A milestone is a promise to produce an artefact, and artefacts are easy. Budget on track. Spending the planned amount is evidence of spending, not of value. Risks managed. In most reports this means the risk is written down and has a name beside it, which is not the same as it being smaller than last month.
03 What to measure instead
Adoption: the share of the target population actually doing the new thing, counted from the system rather than reported by managers. Decision latency: how long a typical decision now takes compared with before. Workaround count: how many parallel spreadsheets, shadow processes and “just ring Marie” routes still exist. Those three are harder to collect and much harder to fake.
04 Why nobody wants to
Because adoption numbers are usually bad at first, and a report that goes amber in month three invites questions that a green report does not. The irony is that the amber report is the one doing its job. A programme that has never been amber has probably never been measured.
05 The one number to add
If you change one thing on the report, add measured adoption against a target, by name of the team. It is uncomfortable in the first month and it is the number that tells you, early enough to act, whether you are running a transformation or documenting one.