Project Health Diagnostic · Free

Your project isn't collapsing.
It's drifting.

Most complex projects don't fail with a bang — they lose control gradually, through missed decisions, widening gaps between reporting and reality, and complexity that goes unmanaged. This diagnostic measures the severity of that drift using indicators from PMI, KPMG governance research, and peer-reviewed studies on project failure.

10 questions · 90 seconds Research-backed scoring Nothing leaves your browser
How it works
i.
Answer ten questions
Short, specific prompts about your current project or programme.
ii.
See your score
A single number, a severity band, and the indicators driving it.
iii.
Decide what's next
From routine monitoring to immediate intervention — recommended by score.
All answers stay in your browser. Nothing is transmitted, stored, or shared. You can re-run the diagnostic any time conditions change.
Run the diagnostic

Ten questions about your project.

0 / 10 answered
Q1 Can you articulate the original scope, budget, and timeline in one sentence? If not, how has it changed since approval?
Q2 Includes both timeline and delivery milestones. Be honest — the tool won't judge.
On track1–2 mo late3–6 mo6+ moBeyond repair
3–6 months late
Q3 The single most reliable early-warning indicator. Trouble usually becomes official long after it has already become real — so the bigger this gap, the later you'll see it through formal channels.
AlignedSlight gapModerateWideWe don't know
Moderate disconnect
Q4 Not meetings — actual decisions. Scope changes, budget reallocations, risk acceptances, priority shifts.
Q5 Turner & Müller (2003) identifies sponsor engagement as one of the strongest predictors of project success. Passive sponsorship is the most common form of failure.
Q6 Not just "shared goals on paper" — also shared incentives, shared decisions, and a clear owner for cross-stream trade-offs. When streams pull apart, the programme itself becomes the biggest risk, not any single deliverable.
Q7 KPMG's Global Project Governance Survey found that in 60% of troubled projects, the official status report was more polished than truthful. When was the last time someone reported bad news and it was received well?
Brutally honestSome hidingMostly polishedReport = fictionWe don't report honestly
Mostly polished
Q8 Most projects don't need more effort — they need the right intervention at the right level. Treating symptoms (adding people, extending deadlines) while ignoring root causes accelerates drift.
Q9 Pinto & Slevin (1988) found inadequate risk management among the top five factors in project failure. The distinction that matters: are you finding problems before they hit, or only after?
Q10 From Chapter 11 of Project Leadership in the Real World — trust, morale, fatigue, and capability are leading indicators of recoverability. A burned-out team cannot execute a recovery plan, even when the plan is correct.
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Project health score

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A second pair of eyes.

This diagnostic measures surface symptoms. A practitioner-grade assessment finds the root causes underneath — and the recovery plan that fits.

Espoo, Finland · Working across the Nordics & Europe
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About this tool

Built on practice, grounded in the literature.

The ten indicators in this diagnostic are the leading signals that recur across decades of recovery work and the academic literature on project governance, change, and leadership. They are drawn from the framework set out in Project Leadership in the Real World — a book about seeing reality early, diagnosing the real problem, stabilizing the situation, and recovering credible delivery.

From the book

Project Leadership in the Real World

Trouble becomes official long after it has already become real.

— Introduction, Fig. 1

Troubled projects usually give warnings before they give proof. The problem is not always a lack of warning. It is that early warnings are easier to explain away than to act on.

— Chapter 3, The Warning Signs Leaders Miss

Projects do not usually derail because leadership is absent in some absolute sense. More often, they derail because leadership is present in form but weak in effect.

— Chapter 4, Leadership Failures That Derail Projects

Troubled projects rarely suffer from a shortage of visible problems. They suffer from a shortage of accurate diagnoses.

— Chapter 8, Symptoms, Stories, and Root Causes

The book is structured in four parts: seeing reality early, diagnosing the real problem, stabilizing the situation, and recovering delivery. The diagnostic on this page maps the seeing phase: it surfaces the early signals that something is moving in the wrong direction before the crisis becomes undeniable. More about the book at ROCOY →

Research foundation

The works below ground the indicators in this diagnostic. The first category extends the book with the empirical project-failure literature most directly relevant to what the diagnostic measures. The remaining categories are reproduced from the book's Further Reading section, with one supplementary category at the end on decision quality and psychological safety.

Empirical evidence — how projects actually fail
  • Pinto, J. K. & Slevin, D. P. (1988). 'Project success: definitions and measurement techniques.' A landmark empirical study identifying ten critical success factors across hundreds of projects. Top of the list: clear mission, top-management support, and effective project control. The original evidence base for treating sponsor engagement and risk practice as primary indicators. Project Management Journal, 19(1), 67–72.
  • Turner, J. R. & Müller, R. (2003, 2005). 'On the nature of the project as a temporary organization' & sponsorship studies. Multi-year research programme that identifies sponsor engagement and accurate role-clarity as the strongest single predictors of project success. Underpins Q5. International Journal of Project Management, 21(1), 1–8; and follow-up work.
  • Cooke-Davies, T. (2002). 'The "real" success factors on projects.' Twelve empirically validated success factors. Crucially distinguishes "project success" (delivered outcome) from "project-management success" (delivered to plan) — the gap the diagnostic's reporting-honesty question (Q7) is designed to expose. International Journal of Project Management, 20(3), 185–190.
  • Flyvbjerg, B., Bruzelius, N. & Rothengatter, W. (2003). Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition. Cambridge University Press. The definitive study of cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in large infrastructure. Introduces "strategic misrepresentation" — the systematic incentive to underestimate at approval time. Directly underpins the baseline-clarity question (Q1). Cambridge University Press.
  • Standish Group (1994 onward). The CHAOS Reports. Long-running survey series on IT project outcomes. Around 30% of projects historically deliver on time, on budget, and to scope. The reference baseline against which the diagnostic's severity bands are calibrated. The Standish Group, recurring.
  • KPMG. Global Project Management / Governance Surveys. Recurring practitioner survey series. The widely cited finding that the majority of troubled projects produced status reports more polished than truthful comes from this body of work — the empirical anchor for Q3 and Q7. KPMG International, recurring.
  • Project Management Institute. Pulse of the Profession (annual). PMI's annual industry survey. Consistently identifies executive sponsorship, baseline clarity, and proactive risk management as the differentiators between high- and low-performing project organizations. PMI, annual.
Project management foundations & metrics
  • Project Management Institute (2019). Practice Standard for Earned Value Management, 3rd edn. The primary reference for earned-value metrics — Cost Performance Index (CPI) and Schedule Performance Index (SPI). Earned value gives leaders a quantitative view of where a project actually stands, distinct from what it claims in narrative reporting. PMI, Newtown Square, PA.
  • Project Management Institute (2021). A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), 7th edn. The foundational reference for the discipline. The diagnostic assumes this baseline rather than repeating it. PMI, Newtown Square, PA.
  • Bennett, N. & Lemoine, G. J. (2014). 'What VUCA Really Means for You.' A concise framework for distinguishing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity — and why each requires a different leadership response. Naming the type of instability correctly is the first step toward an appropriate recovery move. Harvard Business Review, 92(1/2), 27–28.
Leadership & organizational change
  • Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading Change. The eight-step change model and its observation that urgency is underestimated at the start, and short-term wins undervalued during execution — patterns that map directly onto recovery work. Harvard Business Review Press, Boston.
  • Lewin, K. (1947). 'Frontiers in Group Dynamics.' Change as a three-phase process: unfreezing, moving, refreezing. The "unfreezing" challenge — getting an organization that has normalized dysfunction to admit it — is central to project stabilization. Human Relations, 1(1), 5–41.
  • Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. The grief-cycle model, widely applied to how individuals and teams respond to loss — the loss of a project's original ambition, a missed milestone, or termination. Helps leaders calibrate the right message at the right moment. Macmillan, New York.
  • Bruch, H. & Vogel, B. (2011). Fully Charged. Research-grounded look at organizational energy — its presence, absence, and quality — and how it shapes what is possible in complex delivery. Distinguishes a team that is busy from one that is productively engaged. Harvard Business Review Press, Boston.
Emotional intelligence & human dynamics
  • Boyatzis, R. E., Smith, M. L. & Blaize, N. (2006); Boyatzis, Rochford & Taylor (2013). A body of work on resonant leadership — leaders who create psychological safety, shared purpose, and honest communication. Directly relevant to the team-rebuilding phase of recovery. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 5(1), 8–24; Frontiers in Psychology, 6, p. 1702.
  • Merrill, D. W. & Reid, R. H. (1981). Personal Styles and Effective Performance. An enduring framework for understanding individual communication and decision-making styles. Useful for calibrating how to engage sponsors, delivery teams, and vendors who respond differently to the same message. Chilton Book Company, Radnor, PA.
  • Pease, A. & Pease, B. (2004). The Definitive Book of Body Language. In the diagnostic phase of a troubled project, what people do not say is often as revealing as what they do. Orion, London.
Trust, prioritization & personal effectiveness
  • Gitomer, J. (2008). The Little Teal Book of Trust. A concise treatment of how trust is built, lost, and recovered. Trust is the currency that troubled-project recovery spends first and must earn back deliberately. FT Press.
  • Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit 3 — "Put First Things First" — and the underlying time-management matrix are particularly relevant to recovery leadership, where the pressure to attend to urgent-but-unimportant work is constant. Free Press, New York.
Decision quality, cognitive bias & psychological safety
  • Edmondson, A. C. (1999). 'Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams.' The foundational study. Teams that feel safe to admit mistakes learn faster and report more accurately. The mechanism that turns honest reporting (Q7) from a slogan into a measurable behaviour. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
  • Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization. The practical extension. Why polished reporting persists in cultures that punish bad news, and what specifically changes the dynamic — at the team and the leadership level. Wiley.
  • Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming Organizational Defenses. Why organizations systematically avoid the conversations they most need to have. Argyris's "defensive routines" describe the mechanism by which the gap between reporting and reality (Q3) widens despite everyone's best intentions. Allyn & Bacon.
  • Lovallo, D. & Kahneman, D. (2003). 'Delusions of success: how optimism undermines executives' decisions.' The planning fallacy applied to corporate strategy. Why early estimates are systematically biased toward optimism, and the role of "reference-class forecasting" as the corrective. Underpins both Q1 (baseline clarity) and Q2 (schedule reality). Harvard Business Review, 81(7), 56–63.
  • Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. The cognitive substrate beneath much of what the diagnostic measures: anchoring, planning fallacy, narrative bias, the inside view vs. the outside view. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
  • Reason, J. (1990). Human Error. The "Swiss cheese" model of accident causation. Failures are rarely single-cause; they are layered failures of defenses. The conceptual basis for treating root causes (Q8) as systemic rather than individual. Cambridge University Press.
  • Senge, P. M. (1990, rev. 2006). The Fifth Discipline. Systems thinking applied to organizations. Why programmes pulling in different directions (Q6) is an emergent property of structure and incentives, not simply a planning failure. Doubleday/Currency.
Stakeholder dynamics & cross-cultural delivery
  • Aaltonen, K. & Kujala, J. (2010). 'A project lifecycle perspective on stakeholder influence strategies in global projects.' Empirical research from Tampere University on how stakeholder positions and influence strategies shift across the lifecycle of complex projects. Background to the diagnostic's treatment of stakeholder gaps (Q3) and workstream conflict (Q6). Scandinavian Journal of Management, 26(4), 381–397.
  • Aaltonen, K. (2011). 'Project stakeholder analysis as an environmental interpretation process.' Reframes stakeholder analysis from a static map to an ongoing sense-making activity — useful for recovery contexts where the cast of stakeholders, and what they actually want, often changes faster than the project documentation reflects. International Journal of Project Management, 29(2), 165–183.
  • Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J. & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, 3rd edn. The widely used framework for cross-cultural dimensions in organizations (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, etc.). Particularly relevant for cross-Nordic and European programmes where the same governance failure can present very differently in Helsinki, Stockholm, Berlin, and London. McGraw-Hill, New York.
  • Lundin, R. A. & Söderholm, A. (1995). 'A theory of the temporary organization.' The foundational Scandinavian-school paper on what makes a project distinct from routine operations — time, task, team, and transition. Background framing for why projects exhibit governance patterns ordinary line management does not. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 11(4), 437–455.

How the score is calculated

Each of the ten indicators is weighted by the strength the literature and recovery practice attribute to it as a predictor of project trajectory. Sponsor engagement and schedule reality carry the heaviest weight; risk practice and cross-stream alignment the lightest. The total is normalized to a 0–100 score and bucketed into four bands.

Schedule reality vs. planweight 6 Sponsor engagementweight 6 Reporting-to-reality gapweight 5 Reporting honestyweight 5 Baseline clarityweight 4 Decision cadenceweight 4 Root cause vs. symptom focusweight 4 Team energy & capabilityweight 4 Cross-stream alignmentweight 3 Risk-management practiceweight 3

Built by ROCOY — Rauli Oinonen Consulting Oy, a free resource for executives and project leaders who need to know whether their projects are drifting before they cross the point of no return.

"Projects do not ask leaders to be flawless. They ask them to see clearly, decide honestly, and act before drift hardens into failure." — from the Conclusion