Dashboards are one of the most common tools for tracking government project performance — designed to offer a snapshot of health, risk, and delivery status at a glance.

In theory, it makes perfect sense: all the salient data in one or two pages, summing up the entire project’s health in a single glance. Everyone prefers that to a twenty-page report crammed with more detail than anyone could possibly consume in a committee presentation.

But sometimes, a dashboard not only misses the mark — it becomes a trap.

The Model Project That Wasn’t

One of the biggest internal services projects I’ve dug into — and one we’ll revisit in other posts — had all the makings of a success.

It had its own dedicated project management office. It had established oversight committees at multiple levels. And it even reported periodically to a government-wide committee. Given the project was intended to span five years, that’s a lot of official eyeballs giving it the once-over.

To top it off, it was subject to central agency oversight — submitting monthly dashboards to demonstrate project status and progress.

Monthly. Not quarterly. Not annually.

Wow — must have been a blistering success, right?

…

Right?

All Green. Until It Wasn’t.

Just three months before go-live, nearly every dashboard metric turned red.

Suddenly, this “model” project was in free fall.

What amazed me most wasn’t how fast it derailed — it was that for over four years, those same dashboards had shown almost nothing but green. A bump here, a wobble there, but overall? Everything was on track. All systems go.

So what happened? Did the wheels fall off in one quarter?

Or were we simply looking at the wrong things the whole time?

Let’s go upstream for a minute.

The Government Performance Problem

Unlike the private sector, most public sector projects don’t get measured by revenue or profit.

There’s no clean bottom-line metric — no “black ink” to aim for. In the absence of profit, government project performance is often tracked using abstract goals like “improved efficiency” or “enhanced experience.” The problem? These are difficult to define — and nearly impossible to measure.

So what happens?

Things get… malleable.

And when major transformations get simplified too quickly, the warning signs don’t show up until the end. That was the case here, too.

When Metrics Get Soft, So Does Reality

If our performance goals are subjective, then performance reporting becomes subjective, too.

A timeline that’s slipping might be framed as “a strategic delay.”

An overrun might be chalked up to “temporary supplier issues.”

A major feature cut might still get reported as “better than before.”

And when the reporting tool is a dashboard — with simple green/yellow/red assessments — we lose the one thing we need most: context.

The Storytelling Trap

Once project managers become the storytellers of their own performance, the dashboard stops being a warning system — and starts being a sales pitch.

It’s human nature to soften the bad news. Especially when results are still in motion and can be “steered” in real time.

  • Timeline slipping? That’s fine — we’ve cleared the tough stuff. GREEN.
  • Budget overrun? Just a temporary bump. John’s on it. GREEN.
  • Functionality reduced? Well, any improvement is better than what we had. GREEN.

And so it goes.

It’s not unlike this earlier project I wrote about — where a $100M initiative doubled in cost before anyone even got around to planning it properly.

When the Green Light Fails

The green dashboards gave a false sense of confidence.

Everyone assumed things were on track because that’s what the dashboards kept saying — month after month, year after year.

Then, three months before launch, the truth surfaced too late to fix it.

The result?

  • A billion-dollar project ballooned to nearly three billion
  • Lawsuits followed
  • Headlines exploded
  • And the “poster child for oversight” became a cautionary tale

Dozens — maybe hundreds — of highly paid executives reviewed that project.

No one saw it coming.

Because they weren’t looking at what mattered.

👇 Want to avoid being this story?

If you’re leading a complex public sector initiative — and want a fast, honest scan of how your project’s tracking — try the free Project Health Check. It takes five minutes, and it might catch the exact blind spots that tripped up this $100M failure.

You can also learn more about my services here, or explore more real-world insights in the Insights section.