Read the Investment Health dashboard

Investment Health is where Tollgate lands you, and it’s the surface you’ll present from. It composes everything on the registers into one read-only picture of whether the investment is still on track for its payoff. This tutorial walks you across the page, card by card, so you know where your eye goes when a sponsor asks for status.

Open the Tollgate tab on the project you chartered in Your first investment, and make sure you’re on Investment Health. Read down the page with this tour beside you.

Note

Almost everything on Investment Health is derived — it reflects data you enter elsewhere. If a derived number looks wrong, you fix it at its source (a work package, a risk, a change request) and the dashboard recomposes. The exceptions are the calls only you can make: the Overall rating, Confidence, and the key message. Those you set here.

The caption row and the governance record

The dashboard opens with a quiet caption row: the word Dashboard, a freshness chip, and who made the last update. The chip carries the age of that update — Updated 3 days ago, or Status update overdue by 2 days.

What currently governs the investment sits in the stage panel to the right, as a quiet line naming the artefact and its status. For most of an investment’s life the artefact is the Business Case (Exploring, In progress, Awaiting decision, Approved). Later it becomes the Close-out report, then the Realisation record. Select the line to open the full record of the governance decision: the version, the approver, the approval date, and the next gate. See Check the gate status.

Both reads are deliberately thin. They tell you what governs this investment and whether the picture in front of you is fresh, then hand straight to the status cards. The page writes no verdict sentence: the cards are the verdict.

The five status cards

Below the caption row are five status cards. This is the heart of the page, and the split between them matters.

1. Overall — the one card you set by hand. It’s your holistic judgement of the investment’s health.
2. Confidence — your self-reported outcome confidence, with the open-risk signal folded in.
3. Scope — derived from the scope position of your work packages (approved changes this period).
4. Cost — derived from your work-package budgets (approved plan vs forecast).
5. Schedule — derived from your work-package dates (planned vs forecast end — the schedule slip).

Open risks sit on the Confidence card because they threaten the outcome you’re declaring confidence in.

Overall and Confidence are yours to set. Scope, Cost and Schedule are pure functions of the registers underneath them. If Cost is amber, the numbers on the Work Packages register made it amber. That’s deliberate: it gives the sponsor a status they can trust. For the exact derivation rules, see RAG, confidence & health.

The two cards you set — Overall and Confidence — each carry a pencil to edit them in place. Each takes an optional one-line reason: why this rating. Keep it short (120 characters at most). It renders on the card under the rating, where the derived cards show their metric. The reason answers the sponsor’s next question before they ask it. See Update status, RAG and confidence.

Tip

A derived card that disagrees with your Overall card is not a bug. It’s the prompt for the conversation: “Overall’s green but Schedule’s red — talk me through that.”

The Confidence card, and the key message

Alongside RAG, Tollgate tracks your self-reported outcome confidence — how sure you are the investment will deliver what you funded it for. RAG tells you where things stand now. Confidence tells you where the PM thinks they’re heading. Declaring your confidence is itself a governance act: it’s you, on the record, calling it.

Beside the cards sits the key message — your one framing sentence for the steering committee. A quiet since-last-steering digest and the next steering date sit beneath it. Until you write one, the card says No key message set.

The Control Centre and the stage panel

To the right of the cards sits the Control Centre — the queue of everything waiting on a person. Its groups say whose move it is: Yours to decide, Waiting on others, For your review and For your action. Yours to decide holds pending change requests, materialised risks awaiting a call, and a submitted case if you’re the sponsor. When nothing is queued it says so plainly. In a steering committee, this is your agenda.

Beneath it, the stage panel names the current stage and carries the governance record. It also holds the page’s one primary action — the act that moves the investment through its current gate. For a draft case, that’s Submit for approval.

The register cards

Lower down, the Registers row carries the live edge of every register on its card:

• Risks & opportunities — the register count, with a chip when a risk materialises.
• Decisions — the count from the append-only decision log, with a chip for pending items.
• Changes — the count, with a chip for change requests awaiting adjudication.

Work Packages, Business case, Close-out and Realisation carry their own counts and statuses the same way. You don’t have to leave the dashboard to see them. When a sponsor wants the full register, it’s one click away.

The stale-update chip

If the status update is older than its reporting cadence, the freshness chip on the caption row says so: Status update overdue by N days. Tollgate never emails you about it. The signal appears on the surface you already open. Keeping the picture current through the week is what makes the dashboard presentable at a moment’s notice. To understand why Tollgate nudges rather than nags, read Above the line.

What’s next

You can now read the surface. Next, learn to run a room from it.

• Present straight from the dashboard — the signature use case.
• The dashboard is the deck — why you present live from this surface instead of building a deck.