After the game, the reporters descend on the locker rooms. Most fascinating to me are the quotes from players in the Loser's Locker Room. They're feeling bad, yet most of the time they manage to say something that doesn't have to be bleeped. "They wanted it more than we did," or "The ball just didn't bounce our way." Some of these clichés have hidden meanings, and if you know the team well enough, you can understand what the players are really saying.
So it is with project status reports. Sometimes we struggle to put the best spin on the facts, or to convey indirectly a message that we cannot — or dare not — convey directly.
Have you learned to read, write, and speak Status-Report? Status-Report is a language that uses the same grammar and syntax as your own language, but the words mean something different. If you want to learn Status-Report, here are some examples.
Find an old status report from a troubled project — maybe a report you wrote yourself. Translate it from Status-Report into plain language. How much more useful would it have been in that form? Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
- The Shape of the Table
- Not only was the meeting running over, but it now seemed that the entire far end of the table was having
its own meeting. Why are some meetings like this?
- Management Debt: II
- As with technical debt, we incur management debt when we make choices that carry with them recurring
costs. How can we quantify management debt?
- Risk Creep: I
- Risk creep is a term that describes the insidious and unrecognized increase in risk that occurs despite
our every effort to mitigate risk or avoid it altogether. What are the dominant sources of risk creep?
- How to Get Overwhelmed
- Here's a field manual for those who want to get overwhelmed by all the work they have to do. If you're
already overwhelmed, it might explain how things got that way.
- On Schedule Conflicts
- Schedule conflicts happen from time to time, even when the organization is healthy and all is well.
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See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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- And on May 8: Antipatterns for Time-Constrained Communication: 3
- Recognizing just a few patterns that can lead to miscommunication can reduce the incidence of problems. Here is Part 3 of a collection of antipatterns that arise in technical communication under time pressure, emphasizing past experiences of participants. Available here and by RSS on May 8.
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