Five Questions That Get to the Heart of the Matter

It is possible to use information to confuse and intimidate. Status reports can tell all and yet reveal very little. They can ramble on for page after trivia filled page, and in the act of telling everything they bore you to tears and you miss the important information hidden in the data dump.

If you are in charge of a project, you can be lulled into a false sense of security as the weeks go by, yet the status reports become a paper trail that comes back to haunt you. Because important information is in those reports somewhere and because you don't see it, you will pay the consequences unless you take steps to make sure key issues and potential problems are clearly highlighted.

[ I do lively presentations on this and related topics - mhugos@yahoo.com ]

Some years ago I led a team of developers on a big development project. We were subcontracting to a much larger company that was the prime contractor on this multi-million dollar project. Every Friday by lunch time I had to turn in a report on my doings for that week. I listed tasks completed, tasks that were challenged and obstacles that my team faced. I also listed all sorts of project statistics such as man-hours planned versus man-hours actual that week, earned value credits on my work, and projected critical task man-hours for the coming week.

Then the prime contractor would take my report and all the other similar reports from the other project team leaders and compile a grand all-encompassing status report that reviewed all aspects of the project. This report was then delivered to the business executives at the client company who were responsible for project oversight and who were approving payments on the project.

After the project had been going on for about a year (and getting nowhere) the client company began to get impatient. Senior managers from this company began to investigate what was going on; they demanded to know what was happening on the project and where their money was going.

This is typical. Team leaders and project managers on projects like this spend 20% of their time or more each week filling out reports; there is a large project office organization that churns out voluminous status reports filled with words and statistics; and still, nobody really knows what is going on.

Vice presidents at the client company had routinely been signing off on the status reports they received each week without ever reading them in detail. Who has time for all those words, all that boring, badly written text that takes for ever to get to the point? But therein was their downfall.

When the client company figured out that not much was getting done and demanded a refund of some of the tens of millions of dollars they had spent, the prime contractor brought out the loose leaf binders full of those voluminous weekly status reports.

A weekly status report was typically 35-40 pages long with some bar charts and line graphs thrown in to illustrate whatever point the report writer wanted to emphasize. At the end of these reports was a spot for several signatures indicating that the report had been read and its information therefore communicated.

The prime contractor showed that several of the client's vice presidents had signed off on these reports week after week, month after month. Then they began pointing out certain sentences and paragraphs buried here and there in those weekly reports. In those passages were statements about problems and delays and cost overruns on the project.

"We told you there were problems," the prime contactor said,

Continue Reading