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Whether you love status reports or loathe them, your opinion is wrong. Why are both sides wrong? Glad you asked!

Until status reports are appreciated for what they are and what they are not, your opinion of them has most likely been formed without the proper background. Thus, when you act upon them, whether to have your organization complete them or to fill one out yourself, you’re probably doing yourself and your organization a huge disfavor.

Without discipline to the management of your information through structured data collection at regular intervals, you will never achieve anything more than haphazard, disjointed, unwelcome efforts to “improve communications”. You need a process that leverages status reports in many ways.

The #1 Problem With Status Reports

Ask yourself this question: why do you use (or want to use) Status Reports? The number one reason I hear is: To improve communication within a team, a project, an organization or an entire company.

Fostering communication is an admirable goal, no doubt, but if that’s your number one reason, chances are very good that you’re in serious trouble and status reports aren’t going to help — they’re going to hinder! If you haven’t used status reports from the inception of your team, project, organization or company adding them only adds to the chaos and confusion.

Introducing status reports incorrectly will result in the perception that you’ve thrown your hands up in defeat and have resorted to the “worst possible communications tool”; the dreaded Status Report. Why? Because improperly handled, a status report is nothing more than “busy work”.

You may have already tried several other approaches to “improve communication”; most notably Wikis and Blogs. In so doing, you probably didn’t notice the other forms of communication which are occurring without your intervention; things like e-mail, hallway discussions, and post-it notes. By introducing status reports incorrectly, they will be perceived as being “forced upon” the employee. With resistance from the outset, you’re doomed to fight an uphill battle. Odds are not in your favor.

Bringing Discipline to Your Team, Project, Organization or Company’s Management of Information

Notice how I have not used the term “Information Management”. I’ve done that for a specific reason. Information Management and Information Technologies (IM/IT) represent distinct professions. Status reporting isn’t focused on your IM/IT Department although it may involve them in the administration of the system (and they may well be users themselves). Proper status reporting allows your employees to manage their own information; that flow of communication that either needs to get out to someone else or be documented for later retrieval.

So, what’s wrong with “traditional” status reports? Let’s take a quick look at one. If you’re a Windows user with Microsoft Office installed, open “InfoPath”. Both 2003 and 2007 have a template for a “Status Report”. Let’s look at that. For those that don’t have InfoPath, follow along for a moment and see if this doesn’t fit the description of status reports you’ve either been asked to fill out or have created in the past. Let’s jump to the heart of the template and look at what’s being asked of someone; “Last Period”, “This Period”, “Issues”, “Notes”. What will this status report tell us six months from now? Very little. Why? Because it tells us very litle now!

How fair is it to report what you did in any given “period” when the expectations are not present? For example, let’s say you “Assisted three customers with the installation of ABC.” Is that your job or were you going out of your way to make certain someone had a pleasant experience with the company’s product? Were you expected to assist 90% of all new callers, but of the 20 new calls only satisfied 3? Without the context of the expectations placed upon the individual, the content is virtually worthless! This is not the actionable, timely information an organization requires. It’s another example of confusing, bad, stale information. Organizations which introduce status reports to “improve communication” aren’t on the Information Highway, they’re road kill!

Here are seven rules which I think can help teams, projects, organizations and companies use Status Reporting effectively.

Rule #1: Use Status Reports to Document Events for Historical Purposes, Not Immediate Action

If you believe a status report will communicate “current events” for immediate action, you’re fooling yourself. It only takes one key person to be off on vacation for two weeks to throw everything into ruin. It’s my experience that by the time a status report is published, the information contained within is already stale. You need to properly address events as they occur, but document them for later review as well. The purpose of the status report is to be that documentation vehicle by which you can later perform a review (a.k.a. After Action Report, Lessons Learned, Post Mortem, Retrospective, etc.). You need to deal with an issue when it arises, not two weeks later when someone returns from vacation or, worse yet, when someone with less motivation gets around to reading a status report.

My experience has been that if someone doesn’t read your Status Report within the first 24 hours it’s published, they’re not going to read your Status Report period.

I’ve also noted over the years that the majority of status reports written are not reviewed within 24 hours. This makes them better as historical documents than actionable reports.

One of the biggest crimes I’ve seen with status reports is the dreaded “generic template”. Often like the one I pointed out in InfoPath, these could easily be created as: what’d ya do, what are ya gonna do, why haven’t ya done it? Sound demoralizing? It is!

Rule #2: Evolve Your Status Reporting Template As Expectations Of You Change

Generic templates lead to boredom. Boredom leads to two things; status reports that are created by those who should be documenting facts but turn out nothing more than repeating lists of bulleted items and apathetic readers who soon learn to ignore those repeating lists of bulleted items. Don’t let this happen to you! Personalize the templates.

Sit down with your team, customer, manager, etc. and discuss what will make a good status report from each member. Some may report on the status of system services (e.g. the Athena system experienced an outage due to failure of a WD250GB hard drive in the RAID-5 array which affected 60% of the CRM users; replaced the drive within one hour and recovery of the RAID-5 array completed in 4 hours) while others may report on customer interaction (handled 15 calls on CRM reports resolving 100% while online with user) or project progress (milestone A reached). Make the report meaningful to the person and their situation. Be specific, but be brief as well. Note the examples which are succinct; in six months someone will understand these. Remember, there’s a lot of other communication going on already so stick to the purpose of the status report.

Status reports have to be mutually agreed upon. Management should not force the employee into a generic template and the employee should not repeat bulleted lists with each report. Remember, the purpose of a status report has little to do with communicating “current events” for immediate action. A status report is a documentation tool for later review. Even a review of the previous week on a Monday morning is a historical review. Senior management will expect that any issues documented in the report will already be in the process of being addressed.

Rule #3: Write Your Status Report As If Your Next Promotion Depends Upon It

An employee has to write a status report that is relevant to their situation. It documents events that are pertinent to their environment, their contribution, their performance. As such, a status report is written primarily for the benefit of the individual. Sound crazy? What will the individual and their manager refer back to when it comes time to write an annual performance review? And who is the primary beneficiary of that review? Of course it’s the individual. Left to memory, at best management might get one or two highlights from the year. Given an individual’s documentation of their performance and a manager’s ongoing active review, the annual performance review can be a more objective, complete, analytical discussion. Annual performance reviews should not be one-sided speeches and the quickest way to ensure that the individual is provided with the best appraisal possible is to review their performance as documented in their status reports against the expectations of the employee during that time period. Ongoing active review of status reports with appropriate feedback ensure personnel issues are managed throughout the year, not sprung on someone in surprise at an annual review.

The annual appraisal should be a review, not a surprise!

If there were one thing I hope you take away from these thoughts, it would be that you keep the purpose of a status report in mind at all times; it documents for later review. There are much more effective means of communicating on a near real-time basis.

Rule #4: Don’t Use Status Reports As Blogs or Wikis And Don’t Use Blogs Or Wikis As Status Reports

I’ve seen blogs and wikis used as effective communication tools for teams and projects. They’re great for collaboration in exploring some idea, topic or issue of interest. They are worthless as status reports. They lack the appropriate structure (see Rule #2 above). Keep the purpose of a status report in mind and you’ll quickly be able to utilize the right tool for the right purpose. This doesn’t mean that a status report and a blog may not reference the same material. In fact, the topic of discussion may appear in several status reports (as progress is determined to be made, contributions are recorded, etc.). However, the status report is not the discussion and the blog is not the historical archive. The fact that the discussion occurred, a brief synopsis of the discussion (perhaps limited only to the topic) and where to find the discussion may be all that is necessary in the status report. But, it is necessary!.

Rule #5: Don’t Use Static Status Reports; Evolve Your Templates

Your world is changing every day. While a status report template doesn’t need to change that frequently, it should be dynamic and it should be updated as the situation warrants. Don’t create a template and then think that you’re good for the life of the project. Stuff happens; evolve the status report template with the changing expectations.

Nothing is constant except change itself; teams change, proejcts come-and-go, and individuals change, thus status reports must change. For example, after a promotion, at least one template of the employee’s status report may change to reflect new expectations. Note that the change may be to only one template. To properly capture an employee’s contribution may take several templates; one for a project, one for their corporate responsibilities, one for individual expectations, etc.

A good status report template doesn’t set goals for the individual, it communicates expectations.

Rule #6: Use Status Reports To Capture And Communicate Expectations

Goals are something you set personally. A team or project may set goals, but it does not set the goal for the individual. Make no mistake, the team or project does set goals and there is a relationship between those goals and the individual, but they are not the individual’s goals. Instead, they are the team’s expectations of the individual. This is a very important distinction! It’s my belief that this point is missed by every attempt to manage status reports.

Rule #2 states you don’t use generic templates, but it doesn’t state who is responsible for creating those templates. It is my belief that the individual and at least one other person from the team or project must agree upon the expectations placed on the individual. Involving the individual helps solidify the expectations on both sides. Project kickoff meetings are great for communicating and capturing the expectations of each individual. This allows a more detailed analysis at a later date, often by a customer when contemplating an invoice or an option to renew or extend a contract, an after action or lessons learned meeting or at the time of the employee’s annual performance review.

Rule #7: Status Reporting Is A Process, Not A Form

By now, I hope I’ve convinced you that the reason traditional status reporting does not work well is that most attempts to implement it ignore the process and focus on a form. Without a process which makes everyone aware of the power and value of status reporting, forms will fail - no matter how good they are. The company is being cheated if status reporting isn’t implemented in such a way that lessons can be gleaned. The individual is being cheated if the process doesn’t involve them up front and communicate the expectations placed upon them. The individual, manager and company are being cheated if performance appraisals are not incorporated as part of the process. Don’t be cheated!

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