IT project status updates - stop looking backwards

7 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, two speakers critique the common format of IT project status meetings, which often devolve into lengthy technical minutiae and a simple recitation of completed tasks. They argue that such backward‑looking updates provide little value and fail to connect work to the project's future objectives. Instead, they advocate for status reports that frame current work in relation to upcoming goals, emphasizing forward‑looking, value‑oriented communication that aligns the team with the desired outcomes.

That's a great insight because usually any IT project status meeting, it's always in the weeds, right? And 10, 15 minutes of technical mumbo jumbo is what happens, right?
How often is the update just a list of the work that's been done since then? Oh, here's the update. Well, we've done this and that team's done that and we got stuck on this thing. It's not value. That's sort of looking in the past. And what we want to be doing is saying, where is the work in relation to the future, in relation to where we're trying to get to?