Project Management Consultancies Editing and Proofreading Services

Programmes rarely fail suddenly. They go amber for a while, stay amber, and then go red in the month the deadline arrives — by which point the options that existed six months earlier have gone. The status reports covering that whole period were submitted on time, reviewed at every board, and filed. They were also, in the way that matters, untrue.

We edit what project and programme management consultancies produce — status and highlight reports, risk and issue registers, programme and project plans, business cases and benefits realisation documents, governance frameworks and terms of reference, stage gate and assurance review reports, dependency and interface documentation, change control and variation documentation, resource and capacity plans, lessons learned and post-project reviews, PMO standards and templates, and stakeholder communications and steering committee papers. Our editors work on the report a board relies on to know whether to act.

The status report is where a programme is either governed or merely observed, and the failure mechanism is well known to everyone who has ever written one: a rating that describes the writer's confidence rather than the project's condition. Amber means the reporter is uncomfortable but not yet prepared to trigger the conversation that red would cause. We write these so the rating is defined by criteria rather than by feel — red is a stated condition, such as a milestone that cannot be met without a decision outside the project's authority, and anyone applying the definition reaches the same colour; so every amber and red carries what is needed, from whom, and by when, since a rating without a required decision is information a board cannot use; so the narrative is written against the plan's dates rather than in adjectives, given that "progressing well" and a milestone eleven days late cannot both be true; so movement since the last report is shown, because a project amber for four consecutive months is a different object from one amber for the first time; and so bad news appears in the first paragraph, on the principle that a board discovering it on page six will spend the meeting asking why it was on page six. Reports written to this standard cause uncomfortable meetings early, which is what governance is for.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client programmes, commercial information and internal reporting. We are editors rather than project or programme practitioners, and we offer no view on delivery, risk or governance decisions. What we can do is make a report say what is actually happening, in the first paragraph.