Fifty Shades of Green: Speaking and Understanding a Secret Language of Project Statuses

Status reporting is one of the classic management methods that keep stakeholders updated about projects concisely. However, the brevity of statuses opens space for inadvertent miscommunication or intentional manipulation, which could undermine their reliability. Based on an analysis of 2.3M+ status updates from 4K+ projects, we report a few observations concerning statuses and their meanings. While they confirm that status updates provide a basis for project tracking, they also identify selected symptoms of bias and methods of managing it. Based on that, we provide recommendations on how project sponsors and managers should interpret the data.