Most projects don’t fail suddenly. They fail gradually, then all at once.
By the time a project appears on the board’s risk register as Red, the conditions that made it Red have usually been present for months. The warning signs were there, visible to anyone who knew what to look for, often being quietly ignored by a team that hoped things would turn around on their own.
After twenty-five years of delivering projects and recovering troubled ones, I’ve learned that the real indicators of a project in distress rarely show up in formal status reports. They show up in conversations, in behaviours, in what people aren’t saying. Here’s what I actually look for.
The risk register hasn’t changed
A risk register that looks the same in month six as it did in month one is not a sign that the project has no risks. It’s a sign that nobody is looking at it.
Risk changes as a project progresses. Early-stage risks (key personnel availability, stakeholder alignment, funding approval) give way to delivery risks (technical complexity, supplier performance, scope creep) and then to transition risks (user adoption, benefits realisation, decommissioning). A register that’s been copied forward from the project initiation document without meaningful review tells you that risk management has become a compliance exercise rather than a genuine management tool.
This problem will often show itself like this: the risk log has ten items, all rated Medium, all with mitigation actions assigned to “the project team,” and a last-reviewed date from three months ago. Nobody owns them. Nobody is chasing the mitigations. The register exists to satisfy governance requirements, not to help anyone manage anything.
Governance meetings keep getting cancelled
When the project sponsor starts rescheduling board meetings, pay attention.
Sometimes it’s genuinely unavoidable – senior leaders are busy people and diaries shift. But a pattern of postponements, particularly when accompanied by shorter and shorter sessions when meetings do happen, usually means one of two things. Either the sponsor already knows the news is bad and is avoiding the formal record, or they’ve become so disengaged from the project that it isn’t a priority any more. Both are serious problems.
The inverse is also worth watching for: a governance board that meets regularly but can’t make decisions. Every significant question gets deferred to the next meeting, or sent to a working group for further analysis, or “parked pending further information.” A board that’s incapable of making decisions in real time will strangle a project as effectively as one that never meets at all.
The team has stopped pushing back
This is the one I watch most carefully, because it’s the hardest to fake.
Healthy project teams push back. They challenge unrealistic timelines. They flag dependencies that haven’t been thought through. They ask uncomfortable questions about whether a proposed solution will actually work. This isn’t obstruction – it’s how experienced practitioners protect a project from the optimism bias that senior stakeholders often bring.
When that pushback disappears, something has broken. Usually, it means the team has concluded that raising concerns doesn’t lead to any useful outcome – that objections are overridden, or that the political environment makes dissent feel risky. The team carries on, producing deliverables, attending meetings, hitting activity milestones. But internally, they’ve stopped believing the project will succeed.
A team that’s stopped pushing back is often still apparently functional. The status reports still look reasonable. But the quiet energy of people genuinely trying to solve problems has gone out of it.
The same issues appear in every meeting
Every project has recurring issues – problems that are being actively worked and haven’t yet been resolved. That’s normal. What isn’t normal is when the same items have been on the issues log for four consecutive team meetings with no visible progress, no change in status, and no escalation.
It usually means one of three things: the person assigned to the issue doesn’t have the authority or resources to resolve it, the resolution requires a decision that nobody wants to make, or the issue is being managed around rather than through. In all three cases, the project is accumulating risk while appearing to manage it.
Related: watch for issues that get “resolved” on paper without being resolved in practice. The item gets closed on the log, but the underlying problem resurfaces two weeks later under a different description.
Reporting becomes more positive as things get worse
This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s one of the most reliable signals I know.
When a project is in genuine difficulty, the team often responds by making the highlight reports more optimistic rather than less. The reasoning is understandable: they’re hoping the situation will resolve itself before the next governance meeting, and they don’t want to trigger an intervention that might make things worse. So the RAG status stays Amber when it should be Red. The “key risks” section emphasises mitigations rather than exposure. The “next period” plans are ambitious in a way that implicitly papers over the current delays.
A project that has been Amber for three consecutive reporting periods without any significant change in status is not in a stable position. It’s in a position where nobody is willing to call it Red.
The project plan is no longer being used to manage
A project plan is a tool for managing delivery, not a document you produce at the start and file away. When a plan stops being updated, stops being referenced in meetings, and stops being the basis on which the team discusses progress, the project has lost its organising logic.
In practice this means everyone knows a plan exists, but nobody refers to it unless explicitly asked. Actual conversations about what’s happening and what’s next are being held informally, bilaterally, outside of any structured framework. Work is happening, but the relationship between that work and the original plan has become unclear. Nobody quite knows whether the project is ahead or behind, because nobody is measuring against anything.
The sponsor doesn’t know the details
A good project sponsor doesn’t need to know every technical detail, but they should be able to tell you, unprompted, what the project is trying to achieve, what the major risks are, and what decisions are currently pending. When a sponsor responds to direct questions with “I’d have to check with the project manager on that,” it’s a signal that the governance relationship isn’t functioning as it should.
The sponsor is the person with ultimate accountability for the project’s success. If they’re not sufficiently engaged to understand the current situation without a briefing, they can’t discharge that accountability – and they can’t make the decisions that only they have the authority to make.
What to do if you recognise these signs
First: don’t assume things will resolve themselves. The pattern with troubled projects is almost always that problems compound. The longer a project runs with unaddressed warning signs, the harder recovery becomes.
Second: the right response depends on your role. If you’re the project manager, the answer is usually to make the situation explicit – to the sponsor, to the board, in the formal reporting – and to start working the problems rather than managing perceptions. This is uncomfortable, and it sometimes meets resistance. Do it anyway.
If you’re the sponsor or a board member seeing these signs, ask the direct questions. When did the risk register last change? Why has this issue been on the log for months? What would it take to move the RAG to Green? Give the team permission to be honest.
If you’re an external reviewer or a new programme manager arriving at a project that’s already in difficulty, start with the conversations before the documents. The documents will tell you what people want you to see; the conversations will tell you what’s actually happening.
The earlier a troubled project gets honest attention, the more options exist for recovery. Waiting until things are visibly on fire usually means the choice is between bad options and worse ones.
If you’re looking at this list and recognising your own project, Dull Industries provides independent project reviews for organisations whose programmes have gone off track. We help you understand what’s actually happening and what it would take to recover. Find out more at dull.industries.
Trevor Roberts is a programme and project management consultant and the founder of Dull Industries – a consultancy focused on project turnaround, AI implementation, and digital strategy.