The Seven Warning Signs Your Technology Project Is in Trouble

A healthy plan moves as evidence arrives. A plan that has not changed for months while the work underneath it has changed constantly is no longer a plan — it is a commitment being defended.

When build overruns, the test window is the first thing squeezed, because it sits at the end. The scope of testing rarely shrinks with it, so the same work is expected in half the time. The result is not faster testing; it is less evidence.

In a project that is converging, defect discovery rises, peaks and falls. If arrivals stay flat or keep climbing while closure lags, the system is not stabilising, regardless of how many defects are being fixed each week.

Environment instability quietly consumes test capacity. If a recurring share of each week is lost to environments, your effective test capacity is far lower than your plan assumes.

Ask what would have to be true for the status to be green, and whether it is. If the answer is a sentence rather than a number, the reporting line is opinion.

Unmade decisions accumulate as rework. A growing list of open decisions with dates in the past is one of the most reliable predictors of a date move.

When concerns move to side conversations, the governance forum has stopped functioning. That is a cultural signal with a delivery consequence: the project loses its earliest warning system.

Any one of these can be explained away. Three or more together is a pattern, and patterns are what the Project Health Check is designed to score objectively.