06/02/2026
“Why does this dashboard show 47 active projects when Finance is reporting 31?”
Just the thing you don’t want to hear while presenting to leadership.
A customer recently shared this experience with us, and unfortunately, she didn’t have an answer.
But...what she did next was pretty simple, and pretty effective. Back at her desk, she emailed three project controls leads and asked each of them to define what an “active project” meant.
The responses came back completely different.
One team started the clock at budget approval. Another at mobilization. A third kept projects active until final accounts were settled.
The systems were working exactly as configured but the definitions underneath them had drifted apart over years.
Over the next few weeks, she worked through the logic with each group and built a standard definition across the program.
Shared definitions are operational infrastructure. Without them, reporting drift becomes inevitable, even in highly structured environments.
Try it at your org. Pick one metric. Ask three people to define it. See what comes back.
