Is my project on track?

Why the usual answer is unreliable

When a deadline slips, the post-mortem almost always finds that somebody knew. Often several people knew, and for some time. The information existed inside the team; it just didn't travel.

Three things get in the way, and none of them are anybody's fault:

• Summarisation loses the signal. A status report compresses a team's week into a paragraph and a colour. The compression is the point — but the doubt, the "probably fine if the vendor comes through", is exactly what gets compressed out.
• Reporting is retrospective. By the time a weekly report reaches you, its contents are up to a week old. Projects move faster than that.
• Bad news is socially expensive. Saying "I don't think we'll make it" costs the speaker something, especially in writing, especially to a skip-level. So it gets phrased as "some risk around the integration", and read as green.

None of this means people are dishonest. It means the channel filters, and the filter is strongest exactly when the news matters most.

What to measure instead

The useful question isn't "what happened this week?" It's "how confident is each person that we'll hit the goal?"

That reframing does several things at once. It asks about the future rather than the past. It asks everyone, not just the person writing the report. And because it's answered on a scale rather than in prose, the answers are comparable week to week — which means you get a trend.

Ask the whole team, not one person

A project manager has one view. The engineer three weeks into an integration that isn't behaving has a different one. Aggregating across everyone doing the work surfaces disagreement that a single summary flattens — and disagreement inside a team is usually the earliest signal there is.

Ask on a fixed scale

"How's it going?" invites a socially acceptable answer. A one-to-five confidence rating doesn't. It also produces a number you can compare against last week's number, which prose can't.

Make individual answers unattributable

If people believe an honest low score will be traced back to them, you will get high scores. Aggregation isn't a nicety here; it's the thing that makes the data mean anything.

Watch the trend, not the reading

A single week at 3.8 tells you very little. Three consecutive weeks moving 4.4 → 4.0 → 3.5 tells you a great deal, and it usually tells you weeks before a date formally moves.

How to read the signal

• A steady high reading means the team believes the plan. It doesn't guarantee delivery, but it means nobody is currently seeing a problem.
• A gradual decline is the most valuable pattern, and the easiest to miss. It usually means something is going wrong slowly — scope creeping, a dependency slipping — and it's the window in which intervention still helps.
• A sharp drop means something happened. Someone will know what. This is a prompt for a conversation, not a verdict.
• One dissenting low score is worth more attention than it usually gets. One person seeing something the others aren't is sometimes noise, and sometimes the only person who has looked closely at the thing that's about to break.

How Genchi does this

Genchi asks each team member one question at a cadence you choose: How confident are you that we'll achieve our goal? Answered one to five, in Slack or email, in about two seconds.

Individual responses are aggregated on our servers before anyone sees them, so you get the distribution and the trend but never who voted what. Every initiative carries a current colour-coded signal, and a portfolio view shows every team at once, so the ones needing attention stand out without you reading anything.

You can also ask an AI assistant directly — "how is the payments migration tracking?" — and get the current signal, the trend, and any blockers, without opening a dashboard. That's covered on the AI Assistant Integration page.