Projects Shouldn’t Start Green, They Should Earn It

Green at the start of a project—when you’re carrying around all the things that could go wrong—looks a lot like denial. Or at least unfounded optimism.

Most projects start green but end up in crisis mode. Instead, make your project “Earn Green” by directly tackling risk and complexity first. We’ll share real-world examples of how sequencing work this way makes the end of the project calm and peaceful, even when you can’t ship incrementally. Whether you’re a project manager seeking on-time delivery or an Agile advocate looking to make a difference, this episode offers practical insights to transform your project outcomes.

Key topics:

  • The pitfalls of traditional green-yellow-red status reporting
  • How to “earn green” by addressing complexity early
  • Balancing Agile principles with non-incremental delivery constraints
  • Practical skills for recognizing and tackling project risks
  • Real-world success stories from Adobe’s transformation

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Episode Transcription

Richard Lawrence

In the Agile world, there’s lots of emphasis on incremental delivery of value. Agile, of course, is short for Agile Software Development. And in many areas of software development, it’s possible to do frequent releases and for customers to experience the value of what you’re building as you go. You don’t have to wait until everything’s done to release it. This is great for your ROI. It’s great for reducing risk. It’s great for learning as you go, so you’re more likely to build the right thing. And it makes a huge difference for motivation—meaningful progress is motivating!

When you’re shipping frequently, there’s a natural force to prioritize value early. If you want people to use this new thing that you’re making, it needs to provide clear value for them. This causes us to do the complex stuff early, too, because complexity correlates with value—new stuff for humans is complex.

Peter Green

And that’s all great, but we often find ourselves working with clients who are attracted to some of the benefits of Agile but who—for one reason or another—aren’t able to release incrementally. Maybe there’s a hardware component involved, and manufacturing and everything around that means they’re just not gonna ship a little at a time. Or maybe the regulatory burden on every release is a high, fixed cost that precludes frequent releases.

Richard

Whatever the reason, once you give up the idea of incremental releases, it’s easy to drift back into a traditional project management approach. You may be working in iterations, but you’re giving up a lot of the benefits of Agile.

Peter

In this situation, it’s hard to reason about how to sequence the work. Why focus on complex, valuable things early on if you’re not going to ship them? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to work in dependency order? Shouldn’t we just plan the whole thing and build it the most efficient way? In other words, traditional project management with sprints.

Richard

There’s one mental reframe that we’ve found useful for this, to help people get aligned around the best sequence of the work, even if you’re not going to ship incrementally.

Peter

But before we dive into that…

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Richard

Ok, here’s the reframe that aligns everyone around the best sequence of work to get the benefits of Agile, whether you’re shipping frequently or not: It’s this. “Earn green.”

Let me explain…

If you’ve been on a big project managed in a traditional way, you’ve probably experienced stop light or green-yellow-red status reporting. A project—or aspects of the project—get their status reported as red, yellow, or green.

Green typically means something like: “The project is going according to expectations.” Or on schedule or under budget. Yellow is: “Things are off track for budget, timeline, or whatever, but we’re handling it.” And red is: “We’re way off track and don’t have a plan for saving the project. We’re in crisis mode.”

When a project gets started, everyone’s feeling hopeful. Nothing new has emerged yet. You’re feeling good about the plan. So what’s the status? Green!

But, objectively, we’re facing every risk we’re ever going to face on the project, whether we know it or not. Uncertainty is as high as it’s every going to be. All our assumptions are untested.

With that reality, what’s our status? Green! Things are going great!

Peter

I’ve seen this play out firsthand. For over a decade, I was a Program Manager at Adobe, starting in a junior role and eventually becoming the Group Program Manager for the company’s flagship product at the time, Creative Suite. In that position, I oversaw the coordination of hundreds of professionals across dozens of teams, all working towards major product releases.

Once we set plans during our early phases, the job shifted to tracking status across all those teams. And we used exactly this approach that you just described. For the first several months of status reports, everything was green or maybe yellow. And then, as the project entered its final stages, green projects would, like clockwork, tick over to yellow, and yellow projects would plummet to red. The entire organization would start shifting into crisis mode. We called this phase the “end game.” And if that description doesn’t send chills down your spine, you probably haven’t lived through many of these projects. Frequently, after we release these, we’d do postmortems; and at the post-mortem, we’d vow to plan better next time, and then we’d repeat the pattern. Better planning didn’t seem to help us.

Richard

Green at the start of a project—when you’re carrying around all the things that could go wrong—looks a lot like denial. Or at least unfounded optimism.

But what if we had to earn green? You don’t get the green status until you’ve taken active steps to de-risk the initiative.

What would you do?

You’d tackle the most important, most risky stuff first. You’d try to prove your ability to achieve the core value of your initiative as early as possible. You’d validate your most critical, riskiest assumptions.

That, it turns out, is exactly how we want to sequence the work to get a lot of the benefits of an Agile approach done well.

Peter

One of the key reasons Agile gained traction at Adobe stems directly from this approach. When the first teams effectively adopted Scrum, they tackled risk and complexity head-on from the outset. By the time they reached that “end game” phase, they were smooth sailing, having mitigated all the major risks and issues. These teams weren’t burning the midnight oil in crisis mode to ship their products. Their success caught the attention of other teams, who wondered about “What’s the secret sauce over there?” And that’s how Agile began to spread throughout the company.

Richard

That Adobe story highlights how this benefits different roles. If you’re a project manager who wants to see things delivered on time and risks mitigated, “earn green” gets you what you care about. Risks get tackled early and confidence goes up. There’s no more seeing everything blow up in the final 10% of a project.

Peter

If you’re an Agile advocate like I was at Adobe, “earn green” provides a compelling way to explain your prioritization and slicing approach. Agile approaches boost confidence that you’re building the right thing—and doing it early and often. Even if the rest of the organization hasn’t fully embraced this way of working, you can still chip away at risks within your sphere of control. By adopting this approach, you’ll avoid constant crisis mode and can be assured you’re delivering high-value, high-quality work that will benefit your customers and the business.

Using the “earn green” approach requires two key skills.

The first one is being able to recognize complexity. The complex assumptions are the ones most likely to blow up your project. If you’ve ever experienced things going great for about 90% of your project and then the last 10% blowing up—and becoming the second 90%—you’ve experienced what happens when you start with the things you can analyze and work your way into the complex stuff. There are some uncertainties that you can analyze your way out of. There are others that you have to test. It’s tempting to do the ones you can analyze first, because it feels like you can think about the others while you make progress. Unfortunately, that’s also the most risky approach. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do. So, if you can recognize the complex uncertainties and assumptions in advance, you can focus there and avoid having it blow up on you later.

Richard

The other key skill is being able to untangle complexity and size. Taking on the complex, valuable, risky stuff first can feel like it gets in the way of showing early progress and having quick wins. Turns out, though, complexity and size can be uncoupled. It’s possible to start with thin slices through the core complexity—which is the best way to earn green.

We did a webinar with Miro a while back on our Feature Mining technique for doing exactly this, and we shared a template so you can do it with your team. We’ll put a link to that on the episode page.

Now, you may be thinking, “If I report to my execs that our just-started project is red, they’re gonna freak out. There goes my career!” You’re not wrong. I actually made this mistake early in my career before I realized the political implications of showing up with a red project.  I thought I was being clever and highlighting the work we needed to do early on to reduce the risk. Turns out, in many organizations, you’re reporting on your competence as much as you’re reporting on your project. (Which, by the waw, keeps things green way too long when they shouldn’t be.)

Peter

But don’t worry, you don’t have to literally change your project status. This can just be a thought experiment to help you shape your work. And then, when you do show up with a green status report, you’ll be able to have confidence it’s accurate.

Richard

The “earn green” approach isn’t just a clever trick—it’s a fundamental shift in how we think about organizing work. It helps bridge the gap between traditional project management thinking and Agile approaches. But we’re aware it’s not one-size-fits-all. Every organization and project has its unique challenges and constraints. If you’re curious about how this approach might work in your specific context, we’d love to explore that with you.

Peter

You can reach out to us at Humanizing Work. We are always eager to discuss how to make ideas like this a reality in different contexts. You can find us at humanizingwork.com to continue the conversation. Don’t wait for your next project to hit that “end game” crisis. Don’t settle for unfounded optimism disguised as green status reports. Instead, make your projects earn green by tackling risk and complexity from the start. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time!

 

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