Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management: Satisfy Customers and Improve Organizational Effectiveness

Introduction

Many organizations practice color-coding projects to show their status. Green means everything on the project is going fine, yellow means the project needs some help, and red means the project is failing. Most projects start as green. Changing an in-flight project to yellow or, even worse, to red, often causes a three-alarm fire. Most project managers and teams do not want that level of management attention, so many projects that look “officially” green to the outside world are yellow or red on the inside. We call this phenomenon a watermelon project.

Organizations can function just like watermelon projects. From the outside, they look healthy and successful, but on the inside, they struggle to deliver anything valuable to their ...