Look back at almost any program post-mortem and a strange pattern shows up: the warning signs were there, often a year or more before the program actually ran into serious trouble, and someone usually did notice them at the time. What was missing wasn't visibility. It was a mechanism for that observation to actually change anything.
The most common early signal is a status report that stops changing in any meaningful way. When a milestone has been '85 percent complete' for three consecutive reporting cycles, that's not a status update, it's a sign that the actual work has stalled and the reporting process hasn't been designed to surface that. A second common signal is the quiet disappearance of a risk that was actively discussed early on and then stops being mentioned, not because it was resolved, but because raising it repeatedly became uncomfortable.
Catching these in real time requires treating program governance as something closer to an early-warning system than a compliance exercise. That means status reporting that's structured to make stagnation visible rather than easy to mask with rephrased language, and a governance culture where flagging a risk a second or third time is treated as diligence rather than as the messenger having a problem.
None of this requires more process. In most cases it requires less, applied more honestly: fewer metrics, tracked with enough consistency that a flatline actually means something, reviewed by people with enough authority and enough distance from the day-to-day delivery pressure to act on what they're seeing rather than explain it away.