With the growing emphasis on project management skills across most industries, the need for effectively communicating a project’s status is just as important as the skills of executing the project itself. Sadly, however, most training courses and books fail to address this subject entirely or brush over it quickly. It is often implied that pulling out the important details of your project should be easy and packaging it for your team, senior sponsors or clients will naturally occur. The reality is many status reports fail to convey the status and needs of a project. Status meetings often lack the focus needed to effective communicate the project’s status and direct future actions. The result of this ineffective communication contributes to the number of project failures. During project post mortems, we often uncover warning signs that were never presented or were buried in a sea of information. To the project team’s credit, they often knew of the problems, but their inabilit...