DIGITAL PROGRAMME
How to know your digital programme is already in trouble
Most troubled programmes do not announce themselves. They decay quietly. By the time it looks wrong, it has been wrong for months. Here is what to look for before it reaches that stage.
The Watermelon Vendor
Every sprint, the RAG status is green. Every steering pack, delivery is on track. Nothing ships.
This is the watermelon effect — green on the outside, red right through. It is endemic in vendor relationships where the client receives a formatted status report rather than access to what the team is actually working on. The report looks professional. It covers the right categories. It is almost entirely useless.
The structural reason it happens has nothing to do with dishonesty. People in delivery teams have watched what happens to the person who raises a red. They adjust accordingly. Research into what organisational psychologists call the “mum effect” — the tendency to withhold bad news from those with power over your situation — found that 85% of employees have deliberately not shared information with a manager because of fear of consequences. That figure has been replicated across industries and decades. The incentive to stay green is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to the environment that most programme governance creates.
The fix is simple and non-negotiable: stop reading the report, ask to see the backlog. If the vendor resists that ask, you have your answer.
The Missing Sponsor
Early in a programme, engaged sponsors want to know everything. Then something changes. They start sending delegates to the steering committee. Decisions that used to take days start taking weeks. Sign-offs that used to arrive with a single message now require documentation that was not previously needed — documentation that introduces enough friction to make inaction feel like due diligence.
Sponsor disengagement is one of the most reliable leading indicators of a programme in trouble, and in my experience it rarely means simply that the sponsor has become busier. It usually means confidence has quietly eroded — in the team, in the business case, or in whether the programme is still a priority. The deterioration rarely happens suddenly. It accumulates in small signals: a question not asked in a meeting, an update absorbed without response, a follow-up that does not arrive.
They have sold this programme to the board. Their reputation is attached to it. Admitting — even privately — that something is wrong means confronting a decision they have already made in public. So they stop asking the question that might produce that answer. Researchers who have studied this pattern call it the deaf effect: the deeper the public commitment, the stronger the resistance to hearing that it was wrong.
If the sponsor is no longer the person asking the uncomfortable question in the room, find out why before the next milestone. Waiting for them to re-engage on their own is not a strategy.
The Shifting Baseline
The deadline slips. The plan is revised. Delivery is declared back on track. Then it slips again.
Re-baselining — adjusting milestone target dates to eliminate negative schedule variance — is one of the most insidious patterns in troubled programmes precisely because it looks like responsible management. A team that identifies a problem and updates the plan accordingly is doing the right thing. The difference is whether the root cause has been addressed or simply absorbed into the new timeline. In my experience, the more common pattern is the latter. The variability and capacity problems that drove the first slip are unchanged. The new baseline compresses everything downstream and the same issues reopen in the next phase.
In the programmes I have seen, the pattern repeats with a consistency that suggests it is not a planning failure in any individual case but a structural feature of how projects respond to pressure. The plan becomes the thing being managed, rather than the delivery.
The diagnostic question is not whether the revised plan is realistic. It is what has actually changed since the last re-baseline that would make this one different. If the honest answer is nothing — the scope is the same, the team is the same, the dependencies are the same — then the new date is not a plan. It is a wish.
If you are recognising one of these, trust that recognition. Waiting for a second or third to confirm what the first is already telling you is how months get lost.
Milliken, Morrison & Hewlin, “An exploratory study of employee silence” (Journal of Management Studies, 2003). Keil & Cuellar et al., deaf effect in IS project management (from 2006). Drummond & Hodgson, Escalation in Decision-Making (Routledge, 2011).