Project Status Reporter

A status report has two readers with opposite needs: the sponsor who will spend ninety seconds on it, and the delivery lead who will check it against reality. This skill writes weekly project status that serves both — a defensible Red/Amber/Green call, progress measured in finished things, risks with owners and movement, and asks stated plainly enough to be granted or refused on the spot.

When to use this skill

• A weekly or fortnightly project status is due to stakeholders or a steering group
• Several workstream updates need rolling up into one coherent picture
• A project has started slipping and the update has to say so without spin
• A sponsor asks "where are we really?" and the answer needs structure
• Status updates have rolled forward unchanged for weeks and nobody trusts them anymore

Instructions

1. Gather deltas only: what finished, changed, or was learned since the last update. A status report is a diff against last week, not a description of the whole project.
2. Set the Red/Amber/Green call first and make it defensible. Green: on track against the current baseline. Amber: off track with a credible recovery plan you can name. Red: off track and needing a sponsor decision. Red is a request for help, not a confession of guilt.
3. Write the two-sentence summary a sponsor could forward upward verbatim: the state of the project, and the one thing they should do or know this week.
4. Record progress as completed, verifiable items — shipped, signed off, passing in a named environment — never as effort. "Worked on integration" is not progress; "integration passing in staging" is.
5. List the top three risks, each with likelihood, impact, an owner, and the mitigation actually in motion. A risk carried three weeks without movement is either not real or not owned — say which.
6. State asks explicitly: what is needed, from whom, by what date, and what it unblocks. Buried asks are how projects stay blocked while everyone feels informed.
7. Commit to next period: the items expected to be reported as done next time. These become the scoreboard the next report is marked against.
8. Reconcile against last period's commitments line by line, and call misses out before a reader does. Self-reported slippage builds credibility; discovered slippage destroys it.

Output format

# <Project> status — week ending <date>            Status: GREEN | AMBER | RED

Summary: <two sentences a sponsor can forward without editing>

Done this period:                     Next period commitments:
- <verifiable item>                   - <what will be done by next report>

Risks (top 3):
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Owner | Mitigation in motion |
|------|------------|--------|-------|----------------------|

Asks:
- Need <what> from <who> by <date> — unblocks <what>

Last period's commitments: <met / missed, one-line reason per miss>

Guardrails

• No watermelon reporting — green outside, red inside. If the facts below the headline say Amber, the headline says Amber, whoever it disappoints.
• A jump from Green to Red in one week means earlier reports were wrong. Flag deterioration at Amber while acting on it is still cheap; trend honesty is part of the job.
• Adjectives are not measurements. "Good progress" is banned; dates, counts, and pass/fail are the working vocabulary.
• The risk table never rolls forward untouched: every risk moves, closes, or escalates each period, or the section is theater.
• A slipped date never hides in prose. Slips appear in the summary, first, with the new date.