/ How To / RAG (and BRAG) status and how to use them on projects

RAG (and BRAG) status and how to

use them on projects
By Elizabeth Harrin Last updated: 22 July, 2023

Have you seen project status reports with colored boxes in

different shades of green, amber, and red? Or project names
written in those colors where the rest of the text is black?
That’s the RAG status of the project.

According to PMI, 11.4% of investment is wasted due to poor

project performance. RAG reporting is a good way to draw
management’s attention to projects that need support. When
this support is provided and the project is brought back
under control, less of your investment will be wasted.

Let’s learn more about RAG in project management because

it’s a really useful, visual way of communicating project status.

Table of Contents

What is RAG is project management?

What is a 'Red' project?
What should you do if your project is Red?
What is an 'Amber' project?
 What should you do if your project is Amber?
What is a 'Green' project?
How to use RAG statuses in project reporting
Just 'RAG it'!
Is RAG reporting reliable?
Managing senior stakeholders' responses
Using project management tools
FAQ
Should you share RAG status with external
stakeholders?
Your next steps

What is RAG is project management?

The RAG acronym stands for Red, Amber, Green. These colors
make up the traffic light colors coding scheme for
categorizing project status.

The project RAG status will either be Red, Amber or Green.

These colors represent different types of management action
required and are a shorthand for talking about projects going
well or those in trouble.

The table below shows what the colors mean.

B Blue Project closed

R Red Project is likely to deliver late/over budget

Project has missed some targets but overall

A Amber
end date/budget is not at risk
 G Green Project on track

As you can see, this equates to the acronym BRAG. Some

companies only use RAG, and drop the Blue. Some use RYG
(Red, Yellow, Green), although that is harder to pronounce!

And some companies don’t use colors at all, instead favoring

smiley faces, weather symbols or some other graphical
indicator that shows if a project is progressing to plan,
struggling a bit or in trouble.

Different companies use different RAG status definitions

behind the colors, so the exact interpretation for your
company might be slightly different. Check with your PMO.

Use traffic light images

to show status

What is a ‘Red’ project?

A ‘Red’ project is one that is challenged for some reason. It
could be over budget, running behind schedule or have
uncontrolled scope changes (or all three). There are
underlying problems, even if on the surface work is
happening and the team is busy. Or there might be in-your-
face problems.

Either way, ‘Red’ projects need management attention,

beyond what you can give them as a project manager.

The Red status is shorthand for saying that the project is in

trouble. For example:

There are issues that need escalating. The project

manager is unable to deal with the issues herself and/or
doesn’t have a plan to be able to do that. Senior
management support is needed.
There are issues with requirements or project scope that
will result in significant extra work or cost that need to be
approved.
There’s a significant level of project risk with no plans to
address that risk.
A lack of resources is impacting the team’s ability to get
the work done and the project manager cannot resolve
this herself.
The completion date has slipped by more than 4
weeks/outside tolerance.
The budget is overspent by more than 10%/outside
tolerance.

Your PMO should define exactly what ‘Red’ means and then
you can check your project performance against those
measures. If you are not able to justify why you are at Amber
status, then report your project as Red.
In my experience, most Red issues relate to the project
schedule (the work is running behind) or budget (the work is
costing more than we thought).

Read next: How to create a project budget

What should you do if your project is Red?

There’s no shame in reporting a project as Red. It simply
means that management attention is required and is a good
way to get stakeholders to focus on what they need to do to
ensure the project delivers a successful result.

The action to take is first to be honest with the

situation and ‘peel back the curtain’ to show exactly
what is going wrong and why.

Then work with senior management to review the status of

the project. Look for what can be fixed and salvaged. Dig into
the root causes of issues. Close what you can, picking off
priority problems first.

Be honest with clients: if you are in an agency setting or

delivering work for external customers, there comes a time
when you have to be upfront about the state of the work.

You’ll need their support to create a recovery plan, as in my

experience, recovering a project means you can finish the
work but it will cost more and be late.
If, after you have thoroughly picked apart the problems, the
sponsor and team feel that there is nothing worth saving in
this project, it’s time to close it down. It’s better to close down
a project than throw money at something that is not
delivering and has no capacity to be able to deliver the
business benefits that were promised or meet the intended
business objectives.

What is an ‘Amber’ project?

An ‘Amber’ project is one that may need management
attention by the project team are managing within their
existing powers and authority levels at the moment. This
status means the project has missed some targets – perhaps
it is running late on certain tasks or is overspent on particular
work packages – but overall the team can still bring the
project to completion within the currently approved
tolerances.

Here are some examples of what might define a project as

being Amber. Your own PMO may set slightly different
parameters:

The budget is overspent in certain areas but this is not

going to affect the overall project budget or push the
spend outside of approved tolerances.
Certain tasks or milestones are delayed but the overall
delay is within tolerance OR the delay is not going to
affect the project completion date.
There are issues with project requirements or scope but
they are being managed by the team.
 There is a lack of resources to deliver the work but it is
being managed by the team and doesn’t (yet) need
intervention from the project sponsor or steering group.
There is resistance from stakeholders regarding the
required organizational change but the team has a plan
to address this.
There are more than 5 open issues with a status of ‘high’
but the team is managing these at the moment.

What should you do if your project is Amber?

The action for an Amber project is a watching brief.

That means you keep an eye on it. If you are the
project sponsor, make sure you check in regularly
with the project team. Be prepared to offer help if
asked.

If you are the project manager, keep a close eye on the

project status and check in with the team regularly – perhaps
more often than usual so you spot any new issues earlier.
Work on the open issues and try to get the project back on
track.

What is a ‘Green’ project?

A project with the status of ‘Green’ is one that is progressing
to plan. Green means there are no concerns for senior
leadership to worry about and no management intervention
is required. The project manager and team have everything
under control.
Your project will be at Green status if:

The budget forecast at completion is the same as what

you had planned.
You are on track to hit all delivery dates – if individual
tasks are delayed by a day or two, this is not affecting
milestones.
There are no issues that the project manager or team
needs help resolving.

If you report your project as Green, be prepared to justify it.

Sponsors like to have evidence that their initiatives really are
going as well as you say they are!

Never report a project as Green when you know there are

problems but just don’t want to say. It’s very unlikely you will
be able to resolve them satisfactorily by yourself, without the
sponsor finding out, and then all you are doing is delaying
telling them the bad news until later… potentially so late that
they can’t help you put it right.

How to use RAG statuses in project

reporting
The RAG rating for your project (so, the color that most closely
represents your assessment of how the project is doing) is
mainly used in reporting.

On a project status report, the appropriate color can be

shown as an indicator at the top of the page, giving the
reader a fast visual sign that summarizes project status. RAG
can be used for the following reports:
 Weekly status report
Monthly status report
Risk report (add a RAG status to each project risk to show
the level of risk)
Project board report
Portfolio or program reporting.

Basically, anywhere you need to tell people about status, you

can use RAG.

You could also break down the BRAG color scheme for each
area of the project such as scope, quality, budget, risks and so
on. This would require you to flag each individual area with a
color (RAG indicators), like in the table below. Choose the cell
and change the background to the appropriate shade.

Example of extract from project status report showing different RAG statuses
for different project components

This way of color-coding project status by section of the

project works best for large, complex projects, especially
where there are multiple workstreams or different team
leaders responsible for different sections of the work.

Where an element is reported as being Amber or Red, there is

extra text added to show what has caused that and what
corrective action is being taken to return the project to the
status of green. On one project, we had to report the date by
which we thought the project was going to be green again –
that was tricky to forecast, to be honest.

In my experience, on small and medium-sized

projects it is easier to stick with one color indicator
that represents the project manager’s opinion of
overall project status.

Just ‘RAG it’!

I hear this from portfolio managers, program managers, and
senior leaders who want a high-level overview of all the
projects within a department or division. They are not
interested particularly in the detail of each project but they
want to see all the open projects with a RAG rating.

In those situations, I would create a RAG report that shows my

project names (or those within the portfolio on which I’m
reporting) and the RAG analysis via color coding and also
writing the name of the color in case they print the report in
black and white or look at it on an ancient device.

I would also add a recovery plan. Much like the table above,
this is just a line or two that describes why a project is
reported as being Red or Amber and what the team is doing
to put it right.

Is RAG reporting reliable?

RAG reporting is only as good as the project manager’s
assessment. If the project is reported as Green but actually it’s
really struggling, then that doesn’t serve anyone. Project
teams need to be free from a blame culture to be able to
report accurately, regardless of the RAG ‘score’ of their project.
It’s not a competition to be the most green…

…and some project managers seem to have a natural

tendency to report everything as green, even if it’s obvious
something is wrong! There needs to be a level of respectful
challenge. Be a critical friend to the project managers in your
department if you see that optimism bias happening.

That’s why it is important for the PMO to set up RAG

status definitions. When you have parameters like
‘the budget is forecasted to be more than 15%
overspent’ or ‘more than 3 milestones are forecasted
to be 2 weeks late or more’ then project managers
have adequate guidance on what the status means
and how they will be interpreted.

If your PMO does not have a set of defined meanings for what
the different colors represent, then I would recommend
including the ones you have used as a footnote on your
report. Simply add a couple of sentences about the RAG
meaning that say something like:
 Green: Project is on track to deliver as planned
Amber: Project has issues that are being dealt with by the
team
Red: Project requires management intervention

This avoids there being a different interpretation of what the

colors mean. For example, some managers I have worked
with have assumed that Red means the project team is
struggling but “it’s all under control”. That’s not the case at all!

Managing senior stakeholders’ responses

Let’s be honest: no one wants to see a project they sponsor
flagged as Red on some report.

Executives like to think they have a handle on what is going

on and how the work is being managed. They don’t want to
be linked to something that is failing. So the reaction of senior
managers to RAG statuses is definitely something to bear in
mind.

Do this: Warn them that the report is going to show that the
project is in need of management attention and will be
reported as Red. When I did this, my sponsor quickly sprung
into action, resolved a few things and we got back to Amber
in a couple of hours.

Not all sponsors (or issues) will respond like this, but give
them a chance to get used to the idea that their project is
going to come under scrutiny before you send the report to
everyone.

Don’t do this: Spring it on them, while copying the report

into loads of other stakeholders. No one likes surprise bad
news.

Using project management tools

Many teams use project collaboration tools to prepare reports
and the good news is that this way of reporting status is often
built into the software you use. If it isn’t, you’ve often got the
option to set bespoke colors so you can change task
highlights or risks to show in the colors of your choice.

Project dashboards also have project status indicators built in

to let you filter on projects in trouble and so on. If you don’t
have the option in your tool, create a custom field so project
managers can enter the information manually.
If you are going ‘old school’ with spreadsheet-based portfolio
management, then simply change the cell color to whatever
you want it to be.

FAQ
Should you share RAG status with external
stakeholders?
That depends! Transparency and ethical behavior in project
management are important. If the client needs to know, or
they can help with the corrective action, it is best to tell them.

Your next steps

Here’s what to do next:

Make sure you know what the RAG status definition is for
the color you are using. Create a definition if you don’t
have one, so it’s not a subjective assessment of project
status based on the project manager’s best guess.
Make sure RAG is reported regularly, if it isn’t at the
moment.
Talk to your sponsor and leadership team about RAG as a
concept of project status reporting if they are not familiar
with it, and let them know what is expected of them for a
Red project.

Pin for later reading:

Elizabeth Harrin
Project manager, author, mentor

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project

Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the
University of York and Roehampton University, and
several project management certifications including
APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam
in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery
for over 20 years.
Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management
Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals.
She's written several books for project managers
including Managing Multiple Projects.

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