Generic questions like "What's the status on your piece of work?" get vague answers because the responder doesn't know which aspect you need. Ask specifically instead: if you want budget details, ask "How much of the project budget is left to spend?" Specificity gets you the exact information you're after.
Chapters
How to ask questions, tip number 7: be specific. When asking a question, the more specific you are, the more specific the answer will be. If you ask a generic question, you're likely to get a generic or ambiguous answer. And when this happens, you won't necessarily get the information that you want. If you're asking a question, you're looking for something specific. You're looking for a particular answer to give you what you need. If you're asking something in a very broad way, how is the person responding going to know to give you what you want? For example, if I asked you, what's the status on your piece of work? That's a fairly broad and open question. Do I want to know where we are against the end goal? Do I want to know about a specific task or goal that you had for this week? Do I want to know about the budget that we've spent or the amount of resources that we've got left? My question was very broad. What's the status? So your answer can be delivered in whatever you think is important, which is great because it's useful information for you, but it might not get to the heart of what I want. So when I'm asking a question, I need to be specific. How do I do this? I need to know the goal that I'm trying to achieve. What is the thing that I want from asking my question? If I care about the budget and the status of what's been spent already on a project, I should ask that. I shouldn't just say, hey, what's the status? Or, where are we with the budget? I should be very specific and say, how much of the budget have we already spent? Or, how much of the project budget is left to spend? That is specific and it gets me the information that I want. So when you're asking questions, be specific.
