What does each Health mean in Cascade?

The most important thing to always keep in mind with Cascade is that it is constantly measuring your progress entered against the target, and the timelines you've entered. These factors help us calculate the expected progress thereby defining the health in Cascade:

• Start and end dates of an objective.
• Start and End dates, Initial and Target values (under tracking), and Update schedule in Measures.
• Start and End dates, manual tracking, and Update schedule in Actions.
• Milestone values and due dates in Actions.

Objective health is the evenly weighted average of all the health values of its elements (measures, actions, projects) that are contributing to the objective. However, you can also choose what weightage you wish to assign your success criteria, and thereby arrive at the progress of the associated objective (See Add Weights to define the Progress of your Objectives for details).

Each objective, measure or action in Cascade has the following health labels mentioned which present how well they are performing: 

• Not Started - When the start date is not yet passed, or the objectives do not have any success criteria defined.
• Not Tracked - When the tracking is not yet defined for the success criteria, and hence no progress made.
• On Track - On track to be complete by the deadline. The actual progress is 95-105% of the expected progress.
• Behind - Not on track to be completed by the deadline. The actual progress is 85-94% of the expected progress.
• At Risk - When the end date is passed with no tracking defined, or the actual progress is 0-84% of the expected progress.
• Achieved - Actual progress has met the target defined.
• Exceeded - Actual progress is above the target value.

The health is calculated from the actual progress divided by the expected progress, and depending on the value that's obtained and the range that they fit in (as mentioned above), the health labels are displayed. For example, if the actual progress is 25%, and the expected progress is 30%, then 25/30 = 83%. This fits in the range 0-84%, meaning its health is At risk!