Risk Improvement Trajectory(4.2.10)

Direction of change matters as much as current level. A project with a risk score of 60 that has fallen from 80 has dropped 20 points, which this chart shows and a single snapshot does not. A project with a score of 40 that has risen from 20 is heading in the wrong direction — early warning.

This diverging bar chart makes the four-week change in risk score immediately visible for every project simultaneously, so executives can see at a glance who is improving and who is getting worse.

What you can conclude

• Projects with large positive bars (rising score) need the most attention — their risk trajectory is worsening fastest.
• Projects with large negative bars have a falling score; the chart does not show why.
• Projects near zero have stable risk profiles — neither improving nor deteriorating significantly. A change measured at exactly zero is drawn in neutral gray rather than in the improvement color, so a flat week is distinguishable from a week that improved.

How this chart works

Diverging bar chart showing four-week change in composite risk score per project. The risk score is the same one the Project Risk Ranking table publishes: within a week, the share of status transitions that moved an issue straight from a New status to a Done status, weighted together with the share that moved an issue back out of a Done status. Both panels therefore describe the same number rather than two different ones. Bars extending right (positive) indicate risk increase; bars extending left (negative) indicate improvement. Projects ordered by magnitude of change. The comparison is the calendar week exactly four weeks before the week being read, so a project with no recorded activity in that week has no four-week comparison and shows no bar rather than a zero-length one.

This chart reads each project's latest complete week and does not count the week in progress. Projects report in different weeks, so the chart names no single week.

A project-week carrying fewer than 10 status transitions is not scored, and a project with no scored week does not appear on the chart at all. This is why the chart can show fewer projects than the portfolio holds — an absent project is one there was not enough workflow activity to measure, not one with nothing to report.