Red Light, Green Light

Quelle: CIO USA

WITH HUNDREDS OF NEW IT initiatives rolledout in an average year, GM North America is up to itshubcaps in technology projects. But the venerable carmanufacturer is wary of turning project tracking into aproject unto itself. The solution: an easy to use, easy tointerpret project "dashboard" that uses three signalsinstantly familiar to anyone who's ever sat behind thewheel: green light, yellow light, red light.

In 1999, feeling that GM North America lacked a formal,common way to report metrics among workgroups and tomanagement, several members of the IT leadership teamdeveloped a handful of instruments designed to track projectstatus. But useful as they were, those reports were stilltoo detailed for senior managers, who wanted only to keep aneye on the progress of projects many levels below them.

"When you get higher in management, your questions are moreabout the overall health of a project, not the details,"explains David S. Clarke, director of IT operations andinfrastructure for GM North America in Detroit. "As we werereporting on projects to upper management, we found that wewere giving them a view that was too detailed and notconsolidated enough."

So a group of leaders from the CIO's project managementoffice set to work developing a dashboard that color-codesthe status of all IT projects: green when it's progressingas planned, yellow when at least one key target has beenmissed, red when the project is significantly-even if justtemporarily-behind. "The dashboard is a signaling method;it's a way to send a message fast," Clarke says.