How a Global Technology Company Gained Real-Time Project Visibility Across 40+ Teams
The Challenge
A multinational technology company with 40+ engineering teams across 8 countries spent most of Monday in status meetings. Project managers dedicated 2-3 hours to collecting status updates from team leads, aggregating them into spreadsheets, and preparing slide decks for leadership. By the time executives saw the data, it was already outdated.
This affected every level of the organization:
- 3 hours per week per PM spent on manual status collection and formatting
- Stale data: leadership received Monday's snapshot on Wednesday
- Inconsistent definitions, where "on track" meant different things to different teams
- No drill-down, so executives could see a red project but had no easy path to understand why
- Status inflation because teams reported green until a project was already off the rails
With 200+ active projects across the portfolio, the VP of Engineering had no reliable way to inform resource allocation decisions.
The Solution
The company rolled out Traffic-Lights for Jira across all engineering teams in a phased approach:
Phase 1: Define RAG Criteria (Week 1)
Before deploying any tooling, the PMO established company-wide RAG definitions:
- Green: On schedule, no blockers, within budget
- Amber: 5-15% schedule variance, blockers with mitigation plans, or resource risks
- Red: >15% schedule variance, critical blockers without resolution, or scope changes pending
Phase 2: Team Rollout (Weeks 2-4)
Traffic-Lights custom fields were added to epic and initiative issue types across all projects. Team leads updated status as part of their existing standup routine, requiring no additional meetings.
Phase 3: Dashboard Hierarchy (Week 5)
Three dashboard levels were created:
- Team dashboards with issue-level traffic lights for team leads
- Program dashboards with project-level aggregation for program managers
- Portfolio dashboard with a cross-program health view for the VP of Engineering
The Impact
After 3 months of adoption:
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly PM status prep time | 3 hours | 20 minutes |
| Status data freshness | 2-3 days old | Real-time |
| Teams with consistent RAG | ~30% | 100% |
| Status meetings per week | 5 | 2 |
| Time to identify at-risk projects | Days | Minutes |
"Traffic-Lights eliminated our Monday status scramble. Leadership can see portfolio health in real time, and we catch at-risk projects days earlier than before."
-- Director of Program Management
The Ripple Effects
The company also observed additional benefits:
- Honest reporting increased. Amber was no longer seen as failure, but as a signal for help. Teams started flagging risks earlier.
- Resource reallocation sped up. The VP could see which teams were green (potential capacity) and which were red (need help), enabling weekly rebalancing.
- Status meeting time dropped 60%. Two of five weekly status syncs were eliminated entirely, and the remaining three were shortened from 1 hour to 30 minutes.
Products Used
- Traffic-Lights for Jira, providing RAG status indicators across 200+ projects and 40+ teams
Want to eliminate manual status reporting? Try Traffic-Lights for Jira or contact us to discuss your use case.