Stop Writing Status Reports, Start Managing Information Flow

Elizabeth is a freelance writer and project manager living and working in London. She runs The Otobos Group, a project communications consultancy specializing in project management.

  Communications Management   Stakeholder Management  

Many project managers spend a long time each week producing updates that are only partially read. Even with AI tools to summarize and consolidate info, stakeholders often complain that they don't have the information they need or that they “didn’t know.”

However, projects generate information all the time. We have dashboards, group chats, meetings, minutes and AI summaries. We have RAID logs, scheduling tools, document libraries and emails a plenty. The challenge isn’t creating the information for stakeholders; it’s making sure it gets to the right people.

What if we start treating information as another project deliverable?

Reporting vs. searching

Over my career, the ways of working have changed. We’ve got distributed teams and multiple collaboration tools—some of which are used by everyone, some are not. We’ve got the expectation of “live” project data and AI tools to do the heavy lifting when stakeholders want instant answers. And information overload—we’ve definitely got that!

In my experience, stakeholders don’t want more reporting, they are really asking for less searching. There are too many tools, and too many places to look, so our job is to make finding the data easier.

Understand your audiences first

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