I learned a new term this week: “Watermelon Projects” – Green on the outside. Red on the inside.
Most watermelon projects are not green because someone is hiding the truth. They are green because we take dozens of very different facts, compress them into one status, and call the result a dashboard.
One workstream is on schedule. Another has an unresolved dependency. A third is waiting on a decision. A critical milestone slipped two weeks, but the overall program is still “mostly on track.” Put it all together and, somehow, green wins.
If you are leading the program, that green box feels good. It also makes it easy to move on to the next agenda item. That is where the trouble starts.
NDC12 is almost designed to create watermelon reporting. Systems, product data, labels, trading partners, compendia, business processes and external standards will all move on different timelines. Rolling all of that into one color may make the executive dashboard cleaner, but it can make the program harder to see.
I would rather know where the red is forming. Which milestone is drifting? Which dependency has no owner? Which decision is aging? Which assumption is still an assumption? Which workstream is green only because nobody has looked closely enough?
Leadership does not need more color. It needs enough evidence to know where to act before a small problem becomes a program problem.
That is one of the reasons we built New Insight around the work underneath the status, not just the status itself.
Watermelons are great at a picnic. Less useful as a project management methodology.