Amber has become a holding position for problems everyone can see but nobody wants to own. The honest truth about a permanent amber status.
Nobody believes the amber rating. That’s the part nobody says out loud.
Sit in enough project boards and you’ll notice the pattern. A project has been amber for three consecutive reporting cycles. The narrative underneath hasn’t materially changed. The risks listed in month one are still the risks listed in month three, just slightly reworded. And yet nobody in the room moves to escalate it to red, including the people who privately think it should be.
RAG statuses exist to do one job: force an honest conversation about whether a project is on track before the problem becomes unrecoverable. Amber, in theory, is the early warning. In practice, in a lot of organisations, amber has quietly become something else entirely, a parking space for problems everyone can see but nobody wants to own.
Why red is the rating nobody wants to give
Red status has consequences. It triggers escalation, scrutiny, and usually a conversation with someone more senior about what’s gone wrong and who’s accountable for it. Amber has none of that. It signals “we’re watching this” without requiring anyone to explain themselves in front of the exec team.
For a project manager under pressure to appear in control, or a sponsor who doesn’t want their initiative flagged as struggling, amber is the rational choice, even when it isn’t the honest one. It buys time. It avoids the difficult meeting. And it defers the reckoning to a future reporting cycle, by which point, with any luck, something will have improved.
The problem is that projects don’t wait for the paperwork to catch up. Whatever the status report says, the underlying risk keeps compounding at its own pace, regardless of the colour assigned to it.
What permanent amber actually costs
A status that sits at amber for months isn’t neutral. It has a cost, and that cost is time. Every reporting cycle a genuinely at-risk project spends parked at amber is a cycle where the organisation isn’t doing the things red status would force: reallocating resource, re-baselining the plan, bringing in additional capability, or making the hard call to stop and reset.
By the time a project finally gets rated red, the honest version of events is usually that it’s been red in substance for a while. The rating just hadn’t caught up with reality. And the later that catch-up happens, the fewer good options remain for fixing it.
The governance nobody wants to enforce
This isn’t a reporting-template problem. Better RAG definitions won’t fix it, because the incentive to under-report isn’t about ambiguous criteria. It’s about what happens to the person delivering the message once the true status is on the table. Fixing it requires a governance culture where an honest red status is treated as competent early warning, not personal failure, and where the people running reporting cycles have both the independence and the experience to call it straight, even when it’s uncomfortable.
That’s a harder thing to build than a new template. It requires project leadership who aren’t measuring their own performance by how calm the status report looks, and a sponsor community willing to hear bad news early rather than good news late.
An honest amber, genuinely improving, is useful information. A permanent amber that’s actually red in disguise is a governance failure wearing the colour of caution.
The question worth asking at the next board meeting
Next time a project shows amber for a second or third consecutive cycle, it’s worth asking directly: what would have to be true for this to be red? If the honest answer is “not much”, the status isn’t doing its job, and the conversation the board should be having is happening a cycle or two later than it should.
If your reports have been the same colour for a while, it might be worth finding out why.
Honest status reporting isn’t a template problem. It’s a governance one. Stoneseed’s PMO as a Service gives you the independent oversight to catch the real picture before amber quietly becomes red.
If your last three status reports looked the same, it’s worth finding out why.
Contact our team on 01623 723910