Red Light, Green Light

GM North America's IS&S department likes thered-yellow-green dashboard metaphor so much that it uses itto track operations as well. A separate but identicaldashboard reports on network performance, Notesavailability, help desk satisfaction, delivery of new userPCs and IDs, availability of the company's GM onlineIntranet, lost hours of productivity and so on.

"We started with a separate way to do this, but theconclusion we came to is that we can use the dashboardmethod to portray both projects and operations," Clarkesays. "Whether we're sustaining operations or startingsomething new, we still need to send a status message, andwe all understand the meaning of red-yellow-green."