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If you’re anything like me, you manage team members (employees, contractors, freelancers) and customers. Given enough people you interact with, you start having to process a lot of voice and email communication–and a lot of that stuff contains either status updates or action items. Unfortunately, a vast amount of that stuff is long and convoluted, each beginning with an explanation about what happened and finally meandering to a closing that summarizes the problem and maybe offering some kind of solution or way out of the problem.

Often times, you have to read the whole message in order to figure out if there’s a problem or an action item in there somewhere. It can get pretty frustrating, particularly if you’re in the heat of the moment and receiving 20-30 such emails every few hours. Such is life in the fast lane, right?

Not necessarily!

As my good friend Ian Stahl once said to me in the middle of the DotCom madness, “Stop coming to me with problems….bring me a problem and a solution.”

Here’s a nice little template for making status communications run smoother:

1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers. “Milestone 4 wasn’t hit on time, and we didn’t start Task 8 as planned.” Or, “Received charter approval as planned.”
2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project. “Because of the missed milestone, the critical path has been delayed five days.”
3. Next steps: The solution, if any. “I will be able to make up three days during the next two weeks but will still be behind by two days.”
4. Explanation: The reason behind the punch line. “Two of the five days’ delay is due to late discovery of a hardware interface problem, and the remaining three days’ delay is due to being called to help the customer support staff for a production problem.”

Notice that this template is in reverse order of how we normally get status information, but it is a heck of a lot more efficient for everyone involved because of the reversal.

You can read the whole story (and the story behind this blog post’s headline) at computerworld.com.

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