Tips / Tip
Roll up five team updates into one page, and make it show its evidence
Every Friday you've got updates from several teams, in different formats, and you need one page for the leadership meeting. It takes an hour and you'd rather not.
The merging is easy for an AI. The risk is that it makes everything sound fine. So ask for the status and the evidence side by side.
Below are this week's updates from [N] teams. Combine them into one
page for [AUDIENCE].
Format:
- Top of page: three things leadership needs to know or decide.
- A table: team | status (Green/Amber/Red) | what happened | what's next.
- Anything Red or Amber first.
Rules:
- Use the team's own status. If they didn't give one, write "No status
given". Don't pick one for them.
- Flag any update marked Green that has nothing to back it up (no
numbers, no dates, no outcome). Put them in a list called "Green, but
no evidence".
- Flag anything mentioned in last week's update that this week's one
doesn't mention.
- Don't smooth over bad news. Keep it in the team's words.
This week: [PASTE]
Last week: [PASTE]
"On track" with no date next to it is where problems hide, so the "Green, but no evidence" list is the one to read first. Send it back to the team lead and ask for the number.
The check against last week catches things quietly dropping out. If a risk was raised last Friday and isn't mentioned this Friday, somebody should ask. It's the same idea as asking for the quiet item, applied to a whole report.
Read the result before you send it on. It can soften a team's wording, and you'll want their words in front of leadership, not the model's.