With hundreds of new IT initiatives rolled out in an average year, GM North America is up to its hubcaps in technology projects. But the venerable car manufacturer is wary of turning project tracking into a project unto itself. The solution: an easy to use, easy to interpret project "dashboard" that uses three signals instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever sat behind the wheel: green light, yellow light, red light.

In 1999, feeling that GM North America lacked a formal, common way to report metrics among workgroups and to management, several members of the IT leadership team developed a handful of instruments designed to track project status. But useful as they were, those reports were still too detailed for senior managers, who wanted only to keep an eye on the progress of projects many levels below them.

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

So a group of leaders from the CIO’s project management office set to work developing a dashboard that color-codes the status of all IT projects: green when it’s progressing as planned, yellow when at least one key target has been missed, red when the project is significantly?even if just temporarily?behind. "The dashboard is a signaling method; it’s a way to send a message fast," Clarke says.

From inception, each and every project is tracked and rated monthly on four dashboard criteria: performance to budget, performance to schedule, delivery of business results and risk. The individual measures and triggers used to track the status of those four criteria are determined at the outset of the project by the project manager, a planning manager and other relevant executives.

Each of the four categories is then assigned a color status each month by the project manager after he reviews that category’s relevant measures. Finally, the overall project is assigned a color for the month. By design, the technology itself is as simple to use as possible: an Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation template.

Four-Way Intersection

A few years ago GM North America’s midsize and luxury car unit, or Mid/Lux unit, upgraded from Windows 3.1 to 95. For that particular project, the four dashboard criteria were measured as follows.